NW

NW6

The man was naked, the woman dressed. It didn’t look right, but the woman had somewhere to go. He lay clowning in bed, holding her wrist. She tried to put a shoe on. Under their window they heard truck doors opening, boxes of produce heaved onto tarmac. Felix sat up and looked to the car park below. He watched a man in an orange tabard, three stacked crates of apples in his arms, struggle through electric doors. Grace tapped the window with a long fake nail: “Babe — they can see you.” Felix stretched. He made no effort to cover himself. “Some people shameless,” noted Grace and squeezed round the bed to straighten the figurines on the windowsill. It was a dumb place to keep them — the man had knocked a few princesses over during the night, and now the woman wanted to know where “Ariel” was. The man turned back to the window. “Felix, I’m talking to you: what you done with her?” “I ain’t touched her. Which one is it? The ginger one?” “Shut up about ginger — she’s red. She’s stuck behind the thing — it’s nasty down there!” It was an opportunity for manly display. Felix thrust his skinny arm behind the radiator and drew out an ex-mermaid. He held her up to the light by her hard-won feet: “Blatantly. Ginger.” Grace put the doll back in place between the brown one and the blonde one. “Keep laughing,” she said, “Won’t be laughing when I kick you out on the street.” True. The sheets were white and clean, bar the wet patch he had made himself, and the carpet worn thin from hoovering. On the only chair his clothes from the night before had already been folded and placed in a pile. The pink telephone on the glass dresser shone, and so did the glass dresser. He had known many women: he didn’t think he had ever known anyone quite so female. “Lift!” He raised his backside so she could retrieve a sock. Even the bottle of perfume in her hand was shaped like a woman, a cheap knock-off from the market. He wished he could buy her the things she wanted! There were so many things she wanted. “And if you go past Wilsons on the high road — Fee, listen to me. If you go past ask Ricky — you know which one I’m talking about? Little light-skin boy with the twists. Ask ’im if he can come round and look at that sink. What’s the time? Shit — I’m late.” He watched her spray herself now in the hollow of her neck, the underside of her wrist, furtively, as if he was never to know she ever smelled of anything but roses and sandalwood. “Oyster card?” The man put his hands behind his head in a manful shrug. The woman sucked her teeth and went off to search the tiny lounge. It was hard to remain manful alone. He did all these sit-ups. All these sit-ups! His belly stayed concave, a curtain sucked through an open window. He picked yesterday’s paper from the floor. Maybe the key was to make less effort. Hadn’t the men she’d loved most cared least? “Fee, you working today?” “Nah, this week they only needed me Friday.” “They need to be guaranteeing you Saturdays. That’s when the work comes in. It’s disrespectful. You’re trained. You got your certificate. You’ve got to stop letting people disrespect you like that.” “True,” said Felix, and turned to Page Three. The woman came right up close to the man and made a sentence of words and kisses, alternating. “Never. Ignorant. Getting. Goals. Accomplished.” She frowned absently at the nipples of the white woman in his newspaper which Felix — although certainly more familiar with such nipples than Grace — also found curious, so pink and tiny, like a cat’s. “You ain’t even done that thing have you? Fee? Have you?” “What thing?” “The list! You ain’t done it have you?” Felix made a noncommittal sound, but the truth was he had not made a list of things he wanted from the universe, and privately doubted it would change anything at work. There wasn’t enough work to justify five men working five days a week. He was the least experienced, the last one in. “Felix!” The beloved face appeared by the doorjamb: “Oi, it just arrived! I’ve got to go — it’s on the sofa. Take it round your dad’s, yeah?” The man wanted to object, he had his own errands to run, but they were secret errands and so he said nothing. “Go on, Fee. He’d like it. Don’t get in no trouble. And listen, yeah? I’m gonna stay at Angeline’s tonight and go carnival from hers. So bell me and let me know what time you’re gonna reach.” Felix made a face of protest. “Nah, Felix, I promised her we’d get done up together. It’s tradition. She’s on her own now, innit. You and me can go carnival any time. Don’t be selfish. We can go Monday. We got each other — Angeline got no one. Come on, don’t be like that.” She kissed two fingertips and pointed them at his heart. He grinned back at her. “That’s it. Laters.” How can you hide happiness? He listened to the front door click shut, the clatter of four flights of rotten boards taken at a clip, in heels.

• • •

“Felix! Felix Cooper. ’Sup, bruv?”

A giant kid, with a foolish gappy smile and mono-brow and thick black hair sticking up the back of the t-shirt. Felix wedged the heavy envelope under his armpit and submitted to a laborious, complicated handshake. He was standing only two feet from his own front door. “Long time… You don’t remember me innit.” Felix found he disliked being punched like that, too hard, and on the shoulder, but he smiled thinly and lied: “Course I do, bruv. Long time.” This satisfied the kid. He punched Felix again. “Good to see you, man! Where you headed?” Felix rubbed his eyes. “Family business. See my old man. Gotta be done.” The young man laughed: “Lloyd! Used to come in for his Rizlas. Ain’t seen him for time.” Yeah, old Lloyd. Yeah, old Lloyd was all right, still up in the old estate, in Caldwell, yeah, never left. Still Rasta, yeah. Still got his Camden stall. Selling his knick-knacks. Still doing all that. Felix laughed, as he understood he was meant to, at this point. Together they looked over at the towers of Caldwell, not five hundred yards away. “Apple ain’t fallen far from the tree, bruv, for real.” This trigger gave up at least the surname: Khan. Of Khan’s minimart, Willesden. All that family looked the same, many brothers, running the place for their father. This must be the youngest. Caldwell boys back in the day, two floors below the Coopers. He didn’t remember them being especially friendly. Felix had arrived too late in Caldwell to make good friends. To do that you had to be born and bred. “Good times,” said the Khan kid. To be polite, Felix agreed. “And you living back here now?” “My girl lives just there.” He indicated the supermarket sign with his chin. “Felix, man, you properly local. I remember when you was working in there. “Member when I saw you on the tills that time I was like—” “Yeah, well, I ain’t there no more.” Felix glared over the boy’s head to the empty basketball cage across the street in which no-one had ever played basketball or ever would. “I’m in Hendon now, innit,” said the kid, a little bashfully, as if it was too much good luck to confess to. “Loving it. Married. Nice girl, traditional. Little one on the way, Inshallah.” He held up a twinkling ring finger for Felix to inspect. “Life is good, man. Life is good.” People got to have their little victories. “Oi, Felix, you going carnival?” “Yeah. Probably just Monday, though. I’m getting old, man.” “Maybe I’ll see you down there.” Felix smiled nicely. Pointed his envelope toward Caldwell.

NO DOORBELL.

He had seen BROKEN DOORBELL many times before, also KEEP OUT. NO DOORBELL suggested a new level of surrender. Where the Post-it was peeling Felix thumbed it back down again. He knocked for a while without result: the reggae was loud enough to rattle the letterbox on its hinges. He stepped across to the kitchen window and put his mouth to the four-inch gap. Lloyd wandered into view, barefoot and bare-chested, idly munching a piece of toast. His locks were secured in a bun, a wooden spoon thrust through them like a geisha’s chopstick.

“Lloyd — I been knocking. Let me in, dred.”

From around a dead cactus on the windowsill, Lloyd plucked a single key strung on a once-white shoelace, and passed it out to his son.

“Like a sauna in here!” Felix dropped his coat to the floor and kicked off his trainers. In the narrow hall he remembered to give a wide berth to the first of several molten radiators, which, if you made even the faintest contact with them, burned your skin. His feet sunk into the carpet, a thick, synthetic purple pelt, unchanged in twenty years.

“Listen, I ain’t staying. Got to be in town at twelve. I just brought something to show you.”

Felix squeezed into the galley kitchen behind his father. Even this room was a mess of African masks and drums and the rest of that heritage whatnot. More every visit, it was piling up. A huge pot, bubbling yellow at the rim, sat on a gas ring. Felix watched Lloyd wrap a cloth round his hand and lift the lid.

“That book came — that Grace found?” He held out the envelope. “You should take all this stuff to the stall, man. Weather’s good for it. You could sell it at carnival.”

Lloyd dismissed his son with a hand. “No time for that nonsense. That’s not my music anymore. It’s just noise.”

The dishes were piled high in the sink and a small hill of bed linen had been stuffed in a corner, not yet taken to the launderette. A bulb hung naked. Half a blunt smoldered in an ashtray.

“Lloyd, man… You need to do some cleaning. Why’s the immersion on? Where’s Sylvia?”

“Not here.”

“What do you mean ‘not here?’”

“The woman is not here. The woman has gone. She left a week ago but you ain’t phoned for a week — it’s news to you. Ain’t news to me. She long gone. This means freedom, this means lib-er-ty!” These last lines came from the song presently, fortuitously, playing. Lloyd danced a woozy two-step toward Felix.

“She owed me forty quid,” said Felix.

“Look at this. Gray!” Lloyd pressed his hands along his own hairline and pulled: a little nest of white hairs sprung forth. There were only seventeen years between the two men. “The woman made me gray. In three months she made me an old man.”

Kept your flat clean. Hid the spliff till midday. Brought in a little money so you didn’t come begging off me. Felix looked at his fingers.

“This is it, Fee, this is it: how can you stop people going when they want to go? How can you stop them? You can’t stop them. Listen: if you can’t stop a grown woman with four kids then you can’t stop a stupid girl like Sylvia who’s got nothing. She got no one.” This emphasis drew his lips back for a moment and he looked just like a dog. “People need to go their own way, Felix! If you love someone, set them free! Never go out with a Spanish girl, though, seriously, that is serious advice. They ain’t rational. For real! Their brains ain’t wired normal.” Something moist fell from above onto Felix’s shoulder. The constant central heating, the cooking, the lack of ventilation, caused large mold flowers to bloom on the ceiling. Scraps drifted down now and then, like petals. “Listen, I got along without your mother. I can get along now. Don’t stress, man — I’ll be all right. Been all right this long.”

“What happened to the lampshade?”

“I woke up and she’d stripped the place. Honest to God, Felix. I should have called the police. She’s probably back in fucking Madrid by now. DVD player. Bath mat. Toaster. If it weren’t screwed down, believe — she took it. She took the van. How can I sell anything without the van? Tell me that.”

“She owed me forty quid,” said Felix again, although it was pointless. Lloyd clapped his son’s face affectionately between his hands. Felix held up the envelope with the book in it.

“Why can’t your fine woman come and see it though?” said Lloyd, taking the package from his son, “I want to impress her not you, man! That’s the whole point, right? That’s the whole point of the exercise! She wants to know a real Garvey House man. You was just born there. I lived it, bruv. Nah, I’m joking you. Let me take a piss first. There’s ginger tea somewhere.”

• • •

In the lounge Felix tore the envelope badly: a cloud of gray fluff exploded over the carpet. In little rusted heart-shaped frames his siblings sat on top of the TV watching him make a poor job of it. Devon aged about six, in the snow, in Garvey House, and the twins, Ruby and Tia, more recently, sitting on different concrete steps in a stairwell somewhere on Caldwell estate. Whichever way he tore the mess got worse. He took a big breath and blew, clearing the glossy back cover. Twenty-nine quid! For a book! And when would he get paid back for it? Never. Hard backed, large like an atlas. GARVEY HOUSE: A Photographic Portrait. Felix turned randomly to a page, Russian roulette. No bullet: a shy couple, just married, skinny, country-looking, with uneven afros and acne scars, done up in someone else’s too-large wedding gear. No wedding guests, or no guests in the shot. They were celebrating alone with a half-empty bottle of Martini Rosso. He bit his lip and flicked forward. Four handsome sistas in headscarves, covering a stretch of graffiti with a tub of fresh paint. (Color unknown. All was black and white.) In the background, broken chairs and a mattress and a boy smoking a blunt. Felix heard the toilet flush. Lloyd came back out, sniffing, suspiciously perky. He drew a freshly rolled one from his pajama bottoms and lit up. “Come on, then. Let’s be having it.”

This is a photographic account of a fascinating period in London’s history. A mix of squat, halfway house and commune, Garvey House welcomed vulnerable young adults from the edges of

“Don’t read me shit I already know. I don’t need the man dem telling me what I already know. Who was there, me or he?” The book flipped itself back to the page Felix had just passed. “I knew all these girls, man. That’s Anita, Prissy, that’s Vicky, Queen Vicky we called her; she I don’t know — fine-looking women! That little bastard at the back is Denzel Baker. Scoundrel. I knew all of them! What does it say there — ain’t got my glasses.”

May, 1977. The young women decorated and redecorated. Sometimes the boys came home late and smashed the place up, perhaps out of boredom, or in the hope that Brother Raymond would pay them to fix the place up once more.

“Yeah, that’s about right. Brother Raymond got Islington council funding it, and we did mess with them a bit, that’s true. The boys messed things up, and the girls tried to fix it up, ha! — can’t deny it. Except your mother. She messed things up, too. This was the heat-wave. We just took off the door. It was too hot! Where am I? Should be in this one. There’s Marilyn! And — that’s Brother Raymond. Turned the wrong way but that’s him.”

Felix looked closely. Garvey House spilled out into the concrete backyard. Kids barefoot, parents looking like kids themselves. Afros, headscarfs, cain rows, weird stiff wigs, a tall, skinny, spiritual-looking Rasta resting on a big stick. He could not be sure if he had a memory of this, or whether the photograph itself was creating the memory for him. When the council rehoused the Coopers, he was only eight years old. “Fee, look how fresh we were, though! Look at that shirt! Kids don’t fresh it up like that anymore. Jeans hanging down your batty crease. We was fresh!” Felix had to concede it: style without money, without any means whatsoever. Charity-store nylons worn sharply. Battered Clarks coming off like the finest Italian shoes. BLACK POWER sprayed in three-foot-high letters on the garden wall. Strange to see here, confirmed in black and white, what he had all his life assumed to be a self-serving exaggeration. “Let me find you a proper one of Brother Raymond. How many times I told you about Raymond! He was the reason.” Lloyd flicked sloppily through the glossy pages, missing wads of photos at a time. He passed Felix the spliff; Felix declined it silently. Nine months, two weeks, three days. “If it weren’t for Brother Raymond I’d be sleeping in Kings Cross to this day. He was a good man. He never—” “Wait up!” Felix thrust his hand into the book.

• • •

Page 37. Lloyd flat out on a stained mattress reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Broad flares and little glasses, shirtless here, too. Barely aged. Not the familiar locks but a well-kept afro, about four inches all round. “See? You never believe me: always reading, I was always reading. That’s where you kids get your brains. They called me ‘Professor.’ Everybody did. That’s why Jackie hunt me down in the first place. She wanted to get in here.” Lloyd tapped his own temple and made a face to suggest the mysteries inside were frightening in their intensity, even to their owner. “Vampire business. She was sucking out the knowledge.” Felix nodded. He tried looking more intently at the photograph. He asked after the names of three other guys in the picture — sat round a card table, smoking and playing Black Jack. “Two of them boys went down for murder. That one with the little face, can’t remember his name, and him, Antoine Greene. Hard times! You lot don’t even know. People now… That fool-man Barnes. What’s he talking about? ‘The struggle!’ He’s the one with the three-bedroom flat, isn’t he? Full pension coming from the post office in a couple years. I don’t need no lessons from that fool. I seen the struggle.” Lloyd hit his fist against the wall for emphasis, and Felix’s thoughts followed the reverberation to next door,

“Barnesy’s safe, man. He’s a good guy,” he said, in an automatic way, to defend a particular set of memories. Playing with Phil’s daughters round by the bins, looking through Phil’s fossils, growing mustard cress on cotton wool on Phil’s balcony. Growing up, Felix had imagined that the adult world would be full of men like Phil Barnes. That they were as common in England as wildflowers.

“He’s a fool,” said Lloyd, and found his glasses between two cushions on the sofa.

Felix took control of the page-turning and quickly landed on Brother Raymond, seen clearly this time, helping to rebuild the front wall. “You see the Holloway Road, right? So where the Job Center is now — that’s where it was.” Brother Raymond turned out to be a small man, with a neat Trotskyite beard. “You said he was a priest.” “He was!” Felix traced a finger under the caption: “Self-appointed social worker.” “Listen: brother was a priest. In spirit he was a priest.” Felix yawned, not too discreetly. Lloyd grew annoyed at the captions. “Yeah, sure, OK, that was Ann. So what? Ann something or another — it was thirty years ago, man! Everyone been with Ann. She was loose! So what? Who said you could take a lot of pictures? We weren’t in the zoo!” Felix recognized the mood arc of the weed. Next door in the kitchen an old-fashioned tin kettle whistled on the stove. “Fee, go make us some tea.”

Opening the cupboards, Felix found the honey jar on its side, sticking the box of tea to the shelf. He went to work with a damp tea towel. Lloyd shouted at him through the thin wall: “Little white geezer — I remember him! Snap snap snap, bothering us, you know? One of them who wants to get in on the struggle when it ain’t even his struggle. That fool next door the same way — same mentality. We was trying to get on with our own business. Sometimes he was lucky to get out alive, you understand? Them boys weren’t fooling, they were not fooling at all. Nobody said nothing about a book, though, nothing about money. The council would have wanted to know about it, you understand? If you take an image, Felix, OK? If you take an image of a man, right? That’s copyrighted!” Lloyd appeared at the kitchen door, eyes bloodshot. “That’s his soul in a way of speaking. How you gonna just sell that under English law? There’s no way. In a public building from the council? I don’t think so. Go to the library, look at the law books. Where’s my money? He’s selling my image on the internets? My image? I don’t think so. Where’s my rights under the English law? Put a bit of honey in mine.”

• • •

From the doorway, Felix watched Lloyd settle into the old gray velour couch with his book, arrange a little pile of Hobnobs on the glass side table, the tea next to it, carefully balancing the joint at a genteel angle so the table was saved while the ash crumbled to the carpet. He considered asking his father when he’d last spoken to Devon, but chose, instead, the path of self-preservation. “Lloyd, I’m gonna chip.” “You just got here!” “I know — but I gotta chip. Got shit to do.” Felix slapped the doorframe in what he hoped was a cheery, conclusive way. “For who?” said Lloyd coolly, without looking up, “For you or she?” It was that particular tone, inquiring and high — and suddenly Jamaican — coiling up to Felix like a snake rising from its basket. He tried to laugh it off—“Come on now, don’t start that, man”—but Lloyd knew to place his poison with precision: “I’m trying to train you up, right? It’s not that you don’t hear me, Felix, it’s that you don’t want to hear me. You’re the big man these days. But let me arks you some ting: why you still chasing after the females like they can save your life? Seriously. Why? Look at Jasmine. You nah learn. The man cyan’t satisfy the woman, right? Don’t matter how much he gives. The woman is a black hole. I’ve gone deep into the literature, Felix. Biological, social, historical, every kind of oracle. The woman is a black hole. Your mudder was a black hole. Jasmine was a black hole. This one you got now is the same, and she’s nice looking, too, so she’s gonna suck you in all the way before you realize she’s sucked you dry. The finer they are, the worse it is.” Lloyd took a large, satisfying slurp from his tea. “You give me jokes,” said Felix, weakly, and just about managed to make it out of the room.

In the hall, forcing his feet back into his Nikes, Felix heard Lloyd’s hand come down hard upon a page. “Felix: come!” He returned to find his father bending the spine of the book back, pressing at the crease between two pages until it was flat. “Right there at the edge: with the flowery dress — I remember the flowers, they was purple. Hundred and twenty percent. Serious! Why you always doubting me? That’s Jackie. Listen, when she was big with the girls she wore flat shoes, right? Always. Never wore flats unless she had to, right? Too vain.” Lloyd reached out for his smoke, content with this logic. Felix sat on the arm of the sofa and looked down at the alleged elbow and left foot of his mother. Some hopeful muscle in him tried to flex, but it was weak from past misuse. He leaned against the wall. Lloyd moved to bring the book closer to Felix’s face. It was a greenhouse in this place, it was unbearable. The walls were sweating! Lloyd slapped the page again. “That. Is. Jackie. Hundred and twenty percent.” “I’ve got to chip,” said Felix, kissed Lloyd briefly on his cheek, and fled.

• • •

The air outside was cool by comparison; he wiped his face and concentrated on breathing like a normal person. As he pulled the door to, the next flat along did the same. Phil Barnes. Sixty, now? He was trying to lift the heavy flower pot that sat outside his front door. He peered over at Felix, who smiled and pushed his cap back off his face.

“All right, Felix!”

“All right, Mr. Barnes.”

“Held him on my knee. Now he calls me Mr. Barnes.”

“All right, Barnesy.”

“More like it. Christ, this is heavy. Don’t just stand there looking like a ‘youth,’ Felix. Like a ne’er-do-well YOUTH. Give us a hand with this, will you?” Felix held the pot up. “That’s the ticket.”

Felix watched as Phil Barnes looked up and down the walkway like a secret agent, dropped a key on the floor and kicked it underneath.

“Terrible isn’t it? Me, worried about my property like an old lady. Like a PLUTOCRAT. Before you know it I’ll be saying things like ‘You can never be too careful!’ Just kill me when I get to that point, all right, Felix? Just put a bullet between my eyes.” He laughed and took off his little round Lennon glasses to clean them with his t-shirt. He looked searchingly at Felix, suddenly mole-like and vulnerable. “You off to carnival, Felix?”

“Yeah. Probably. Tomorrow. Saturday today, though, innit.”

“Course it is, course it is. My brain’s failing me. How’s your dad? Not seen him out and about much, recently.”

“Lloyd’s all right. Lloyd’s Lloyd.”

It touched Felix that Phil Barnes was kind enough to pretend, to Felix, that he, Barnes, and his neighbor of thirty years were on speaking terms. “That’s eloquence, Felix! ‘A word can paint a thousand pictures!’ Well it can, can’t it? Though thinking about it, isn’t it the other way round, come to think of it: a picture can paint a thousand words?”

Felix shrugged pleasantly.

“Ignore me, Felix! I’ve become one of the doddering old. Must bore you to tears listening to the likes of me. I remember when I was young, I couldn’t be having it, old people complaining, going on. Let the young get on with it! Have a bit faith in them! Let them do their own thing! I’m a bit anti-establishment, you know, but then I was a Mod, wasn’t I. Still am, in my own way. But these days,” said Phil, and put a hand on the balcony rail, “well, they just feel no hope, the young people, Felix, no hope, we’ve used all their resources, haven’t we, used them up, well, we have! And now I’m giving you another lecture, aren’t I? Run away! Run away! I’m like the ‘Silver Tsunami!’ You read that? It was in The Guardian the other week. ‘Silver Tsunami.’ That’s me, apparently. Born between 1949 and 19 something else. Selfish baby-boomer. We’ve taken all the resources, you see. I said that to Amy and she said, ‘Well, what have we got to bloody show for it?!’ That made me laugh. She’s not very politically minded, Amy, you see, but she means well. She does mean well,” said Phil, and looked troubled, for he had strayed too far from small talk right to the center of things — it happened more and more these days — and now must try to return to the things that didn’t matter. “How old are you now, Felix?”

Felix punched a fist into his other waiting palm. “Thirty-two. I’m getting old. Ain’t even funny no more.”

“Well, it never is, is it? That’s why they complain all the time, the old. I’m beginning to have some sympathy with them, I can tell you — aches and pains. Press that button now, will you? Broken? Ah well, let’s take the stairs — better for you. Those lifts are really a disgrace.” Felix pushed the fire door wide and held it open for Barnesy. “On the other hand they’ve got nothing else to do, have they, these kids? That’s what gets me. That’s what someone should say.”

Together they made their way down the narrow breeze-block stairwell, Barnesy in front, Felix behind. From the back it was a sort of time travel to look at him, no fatter or thinner, no change in the clothes, no sign of the twenty-year distance between then and now. His fine, fair hair was turning white in a subtle silvery way, so it seemed to be simply getting blonder, and it still fell, in a young man’s style, just to his shoulders, which were rounded and bear-like and soft as they always had been. He still wore a black waistcoat, undone, with a CND badge on the lapel, over an enormous white t-shirt, and elasticated jeans in a light blue wash. In his back pockets he kept a pair of soft slippers, for putting on the moment his rounds were finished. You’d see him in Rose’s café on the high road, slippers on, eating his lunch. Felix had thought this an eccentric touch until he, too, delivered the post, for five months only, at the turn of the century, and found it to be the most exhausting work he’d ever done.

“They always say ‘youth’ don’t they?” said Phil and stopped once more, halfway down the stairs, in a thoughtful pose. Felix leaned against the handrail and waited, though he had heard this speech many times. “Never the boys from the posh bit up by the park, they’re just boys, but our lot are ‘youths,’ our working-class lads are youths, bloody terrible isn’t it? They come round here, Felix — I was trying to tell your dad, but he wasn’t bothered, you know him, usually thinking more about the ladies than anything else — the police come round here asking after our kids (not our kids, literally, obviously our kids are long gone) but the community’s kids, looking for information, you know. Save their big houses on the park from our kids! It’s shameful, it really is. But you don’t care about all that rubbish, do you, Felix, your lot? Just wanna have fun. And why shouldn’t you? Leave them kids alone, I say. It’s my opinion — the wife thinks I’ve got too many, but there you are. This new lot in here, they just don’t want to know. Breaks my heart. Just watching all that reality TV, reading the rags, all that bloody rubbish, just shut your mouth and buy a new phone — that’s how people are round here these days. They’re not organized, they’re not political — now, I used to have some good conversations with your mum way back when. Very good conversations, very interesting. She had a lot of interesting ideas, you know. Of course, I realize she was troubled, very troubled. But she had that thing most people don’t have: curiosity. She might not have always got the right answers but she wanted to ask the questions. I value that in a person. We used to call each other ‘Comrade’—wind your dad up! She was an interesting woman, your mum, I could talk to her — it’s very hard, Felix, you see, if you are interested in ideas and all that, ideas and philosophies of the past — it’s very hard to find someone round here to really talk to, that’s the tragedy of the thing, really, I mean, when you think about it. Certainly I can’t find anyone round here to talk to anymore. And for a woman it’s even harder, you see. They can feel very trapped. Because of the patriarchy. I do feel everyone needs to have these little chats now and then. Yes, very interesting woman, your mother, very delicate. It’s hard for someone like that.”

“Yeah,” said Felix.

“You sound doubtful. Course, I didn’t know your mum very well, I’m sure… I know your dad hasn’t got much good to say about her. I don’t know. Complicated, innit. Families. You’re too close to it, it’s hard to see. I’ll give you an analogy. See them paintings your dad sells sometimes, the dots, with the secret picture? If you stand too close, you can’t see. But I’m across the room, aren’t I? Different perspective. When my old man was in his residential home — dump, terrible dump — but I’ll tell you, some of them nurses told me things about him I just had not a clue about. Not a clue. Knew him better than I did. In some senses. Not all. But. You see what I’m trying to say, anyway. It’s a context thing, really.”

Now they stepped out onto the communal grass, under a mighty sun, huge and orange in the sky.

“And your sisters, they’re well are they? Still can’t tell them apart, I bet.”

“Those girls, man. Tia’s just long. Ruby’s bare lazy.”

“Your words! Not my words! Let the record show!” said Phil, chuckling, and put his hands up in the air like an innocent man. “Now let me get this right: ‘long’ means always late, doesn’t it? I think you told me that last time. See! No flies on me. I keep up with the slang. And ‘bare’ means ‘a lot of’ or ‘very’ or ‘really.’ It’s an intensifier, more or less. I keep up. Helps living in here, you hear the kids talking, you stop and ask them. They look at me like I’m a mental case, as you might imagine.” He sighed. Then came the difficult segue, always difficult in the same way.

“And the youngest lad? Devon? How’s he doing?”

Felix nodded, to convey his respect for the question. Phil was the only person on the whole estate who ever asked after his brother.

“He’s all right, man. He’s doing all right.”

They crossed the lawn in silence.

“If it wasn’t for these, I tell you Felix, I sometimes think I’d be gone from here, I really would. Move to Bournemouth with all the other old bastards.” He rapped the tree with a knuckle and made Felix stop under it and look up: an enclosing canopy of thick foliage, like standing under the bell skirts of a Disney princess. Felix never knew what to say about nature. He waited.

“A bit of green is very powerful, Felix. Very powerful. ’Specially in England. Even us Londoners born and bred, we need it, we go up the Heath, don’t we, we crave it. Even our little park here is important. Bit of green. In some melodious plot/ Of beechen green/ and shadows numberless… Name that verse! Ode to a Nightingale! Very famous poem, that. Keats. Londoner he was, you see. But why should you know it! Who would have taught it to you? You’ve got your music, haven’t you, your hip hop, and your rap — what’s the difference between those two? I’ve never been sure. I have to say I can’t understand the bling-bling business at all, Felix — seems very backward to me, all that focus on money. Maybe it’s a symbol for something else — I can’t tell. Anyway I’ve got my verses, at least. But I had to learn them myself! In those days, you failed the eleven plus and that was it — on your bike. That’s how it used to be. What education I’ve got I’ve had to get myself. I grew up angry about it. But that’s how it used to be in England for our sort of people. It’s the same thing now with a different name. You should be angry about it, too, Felix, you should!”

“I’m more about the day-to-day.” Felix nudged Phil Barnes in his side. “You’re a proper old leftie, Barnesy, proper commie.”

Laughter again, bent with laughter, hands on knees. When he reared back up Felix saw tears in his eyes.

“I am! You must think: what’s he on about, half the time. Propaganda! What’s he on about?” His face went slack and sentimental. “But I believe in the people, you see, Felix. I believe in them. Not that it’s done me any good, but I do. I really do.”

“Yes, Barnsey. Take it to the bridge,” said Felix and thumped his old friend on the back.

They made their way out of the estate, up the hill, toward the street.

“I’m going up the depot, Felix. Afternoon shift. Sorting. Where’re you going? You walking down the high road?”

“Nah. I’m late — I’m going into town. Best get the train. Might get this bus first.”

It was right in front of them, opening its doors. Mrs. Mulherne, another Caldwell resident, was dragging a shopping bag backward out of the wrong door, her back bent, her tights wrinkled at her fragile ankles — Barnes ran forward to help her. Felix thought he’d better help, too. She felt light, almost fly-away. Women aged differently. When he was twelve Mulherne had seemed just a little too old to be running around with his dad: now she seemed like his father’s mother. Next-morning glimpse of a pair of sturdy pink legs, wrapped in a ratty bath towel, dashing down the corridor to the only loo. Not the only one, either. “So brave, looking after them four wee ones by yourself. She’s not good enough for you, dear. You deserve better. Everyone feels so bad for you.” The Ladies of Caldwell expressing their sympathies. At bus stops, in doctors’ waiting rooms, in Woolworths. Like a hit song that follows you from shop to shop. “Does everything for them kids. Die for them kids. More than I can say for her.” One of them, Mrs. Steele, was his own dinner lady. A great blush whenever she saw him — and extra chips. Funny what you remember later — what you realize.

• • •

“Grace what?” “Grace. End of.” “You don’t have a last name?” “Not for you.” At this same bus stop. Eyes on the ankles of her dark blue jeans, straightening the cuffs over and over so they sat right on her high black boots. Kiss curl cemented to her forehead. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. “Come on now, don’t be like that. Listen: know what ‘Felix’ means? Happy. I bring happiness, innit? But can I ask you something? Does it bother you if I sit here? Grace? Can I speak to you? Both waiting for the same bus, innit? Might as well. But does it bother you if I sit here?” She had looked up at him finally, with manufactured eyes, the light brown kind you buy on the high road. She looked supernatural. And he had known at once: this is my happiness. I’ve been waiting at this bus stop all my life and my happiness has finally arrived. She spoke! “Felix — that’s your name, yeah? You ain’t bothering me, Felix. You would have to matter to me to bother me, you get me? Yeah. It’s like that.” Her bus coming over the hill. Then. Now. “Nah, wait, don’t be like that, listen to me: I’m not trying to chirps you. You just struck me. I want to know you that’s all. You got a face that’s very… intensified.” Lift of a movie star’s eyebrow: “Is it. You got a face like somebody who chirpses girls at bus stops.”

• • •

Five and innocent at this bus stop. Fourteen and drunk. Twenty-six and stoned. Twenty-nine in utter oblivion, out of his mind on coke and K: “You can’t sleep here, son. You either need to move it along or we’ll have to take you in to the station to sleep it off.” You live in the same place long enough, you get memory overlap. “Thanks for seeing me off, Felix, love. Good to see you. Knock on my door any time. Send my love to Lloyd. I’m just downstairs and you’re always welcome.” Felix jumped back on the bus. He waved at Phil Barnes, who gave him a double thumbs up. He waved at Mrs. Mulherne as the bus climbed the hill and overtook her. He pressed a hand against the glass. Grace at seventy. The Tinkerbell tattoo in the base of her back, wrinkled, or expanded. But how could Grace ever be seventy? Look at her. (“And, Fee, remember: I weren’t even meant to be there. I was meant to be at my aunt’s in Wembley. Remember? That’s the day I was meant to be looking after her kids, but she broke her foot, she was home. So then I was like: might as well get the bus into town, do some shopping. Felix, please don’t try and tell me that weren’t fate. I don’t care what nobody says, blatantly everything happens for a reason. Don’t try and tell me that the universe didn’t want me to be there, at that moment!”)

• • •

Mind the gap. Felix stepped in the second carriage from the end and looked at a tube map like a tourist, taking a moment to convince himself of details no life-long Londoner should need to check: Kilburn to Baker Street (Jubilee): Baker street to Oxford Circus (Bakerloo). Other people trust themselves. A variation of the same instinct had his hand deep in his pocket clutching a piece of paper with a name on it. A train barrelled past, knocking him into the seat he’d been heading for. After a moment the two trains seemed to cruise together. He looked out now at his counterpart, in the other train. Small woman, whom he would have judged Jewish without being able to articulate any very precise reason why: dark, pretty, smiling to herself, in a blue dress from the seventies — big collar, tiny white bird print. She was frowning at his t-shirt. Trying to figure it. He felt like it: he smiled! A broad smile that emphasized his dimples and revealed three gold teeth. The girl’s little dark face pulled tight like a net bag. Her train pulled ahead, then his did.

(W1)

“You’re Felix? Hi! Great! You’re Felix!”

He was standing outside Topshop. A tall, skinny white boy, with a lot of chestnut fringe floppy in his face. Drainpipe jeans, boxy black spectacles. He seemed to need a moment to re-arrange his brain, which Felix allowed him, taking out his tobacco and beginning to roll while the boy said, “Tom Mercer — it’s just round the corner; well, a few streets over,” and laughed as a way of covering his surprise. Felix did not know why his own voice so often misled on the phone.

“Shall we? I mean, can you do that and walk?”

“With one hand and running, bruv.”

“Ha. Very good. This way.”

But he did not seem to know how to negotiate the corner crush between Oxford and Regent streets; after a few false starts he was half a foot further back than he had been a moment ago. Felix licked a Rizla and watched the boy concede to a Peruvian holding a twelve-foot banner: BARGAIN CARPET SALE 100 YARDS. Not from London, not originally, thought Felix, who had been to Wiltshire once and returned astounded. Felix stepped in front and took control, walking through a crowd of Indian girls with luxurious black ponytails and little gold Selfridges badges pinned to their lapels. They walked against the natural flow, the white boy and Felix — it took them five minutes to cross the road. Felix diagnosed a hangover. Cracked lips and panda eyes. A delicate reaction to light.

Felix tried: “You had her long or…?”

The boy looked startled. He put his hand in his fringe.

“Have I…? Oh, I see. No. I mean, she was a present a few years ago, my 21st — hand-me-down from my father — he’d had her a long time… Not a very practical present. But you’re a specialist, of course — you won’t have the same sort of trouble.”

“Mechanic.”

“Right. My father knows your garage. He’s had these cars for thirty years — longer — he knows all the specialist garages. Kilburn, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s sort of Notting Hill way, isn’t it?”

“Nah, not really.”

“Ah, now, Felix? We’ll do a left here. Escape this chaos.”

They ducked down a cobbled side street. Fifty yards away, on Oxford Street, people pressed against people, dense as carnival, almost as loud. Back here all was silent, empty. Slick black doors, brass knobs, brass letterboxes, lamp-posts out of fairy stories. Old paintings in ornate gold frames, resting on easels, angled toward the street. PRICE UPON APPLICATION. Ladies’ hats, each on its own perch, feathered, ready to fly. RING FOR ASSISTANCE. Shop after shop without a soul in it. At the end of this little row, Felix spotted a customer through a mullioned, glittering, window sitting on a leather pouf, trying on one of those green jackets, waxy like a tablecloth, with the tartan inside. Halfway up, the window glass became clear, revealing a big pink face, with scraps of white hair here and there, mostly in the ears. The type Felix saw all the time, especially in this part of town. A great tribe of them. Didn’t mix much — kept to their own kind. THE HORSE AND HARE.

“Good pub, that pub,” said Felix. It was something to say.

“My father swears by it. When he’s in London it’s his second home.”

“Is it. I used to work round here, back in the day. Bit of film work.”

“Really? Which company?”

“All about. Wardour Street and that,” Felix added and regretted it at once.

“I have a cousin who’s a VP at Sony, I wonder if you ever came across him? Daniel Palmer. In Soho Square?”

“Yeah, nah… I was just a runner, really. Here and there. Different places.”

“Got you,” said Tom, and looked satisfied. A small puzzle had been resolved. “I’m very interested in film — I used to dabble a bit in all that, you know, the way narrative works, how you can tell a story through images…”

Felix put his hood up. “You in the industry, yeah?”

“Not exactly, I mean, no, not at the moment, no. I mean I’m sure I could have been, but it’s a very unstable business, film. When I was in college I was really a film guy, buff, type. No, I’m sort of in the creative industries. Sort of media-related creative industry. It’s hard to explain — I work for a company that creates ideas for brand consolidation? So that brands can better target receptivity for their products — cutting-edge brand manipulation, basically.”

Felix stopped walking, forcing the boy to stop. He looked vacantly at his unlit fag.

“Like advertising?”

“Basically, yes,” said Tom irritably, and then, when Felix didn’t follow him: “Need a light?”

“Nah. Got one here somewhere. Like advertising campaigns?”

“Well, no not really, because — it’s difficult to explain — basically we don’t see campaigns as a way forward anymore. It’s more about the integration of luxury brands into your everyday consciousness.”

“Advertising,” concluded Felix, drew his lighter out of his pocket and assumed a face of innocence.

“It’s just this next right, if you’ll…”

“Right behind you, bruv.”

They walked through a grand square, and then off into a side street, although the houses here were no less grand: white-fronted and many stories high. Somewhere church bells rang. Felix slipped his hood off.

“Here we are — here she is. I mean, obviously this is not the sort of thing where — sorry, Felix, will you excuse me a moment? I better take this.”

The boy put his phone to his ear and sat on the black-and-white tiled steps of the nearest house, dead center between two potted orange trees. Felix walked a half circle until he was standing in the road. He crouched. She was smiling at him, but they all do that, no matter what state they’re in. Frog-eye headlamps, manic grille grin. One-eyed in this case. He touched the spot where the badge should be. When the time came it would be a silver octagon, with the two letters back to back, dancing. Not plastic. Metal. It was going to be done right. He straightened up. He put his hand through the giant slash in the soft top and rubbed the fabric between his fingers: a thin, faded polyester weave. Plastic window gone anyway. The rust he didn’t need to touch, he could see how bad it was. Worst at the rear left — it was like a continent there — but also pretty drastic all round the bonnet, which meant it had likely rusted through. Still: the right red. The original red. Good arch on the front wheels, square as they should be at the back, and a perfect rubber bumper — all of which marked it as authentically what it claimed to be, at least. M DGET. Easily fixed, like all of this external stuff — cosmetic. Under the hood was where the real news would be. In a funny way, the worse the news the better it was for him. Barry, at the garage: “If it moves, son, you can’t afford it.” He would make it move. Maybe not this month or the one after, but finally. A little impatiently he tried a door handle. He had an urge to rip through the blown-out window, taped shut with cardboard and masking tape.

“It’s not a question of who feels more,” the boy said. He was pulling a pebble back and forth across the tile with a foot. Felix leaned against the car. “Soph? Soph? Look, I can’t talk now. Of course not! My phone was dead. No, not now. Please calm down. Soph, I’m in the middle of a thing. Soph?” The boy took the phone from his ear and looked at it curiously for a moment. He slid it back into the pocket of his coat. Felix whistled.

“Ninety-nine problems. I hear you, bruv.”

“Sorry — what?”

“The car. It’s got some problems.”

“Well, yes,” said Tom Mercer, and made an expansive gesture that meant to take in the whole vehicle. “Of course, it’s clearly a project car. This is not something you’re going to drive away in. Hence the price. Otherwise we’d be talking in the many thousands. Clearly a project car. Let me open it up, give you the full tour.”

Felix watched Tom wrestle with the key.

“I can do that if—” began Felix. The door popped.

“Just needs a wangle. Project car, as I say. But doable.” The tour turned out to be somewhat limited. “Clutch” said Tom, and “Gears,” and “Steering wheel,” brushing these objects vaguely with his hand, and then, as they both looked dolefully at the moldy, curled carpet and rusted floor, the wool and wire bursting out of the stained upholstery, the hole where the radio should be, he murmured the year of manufacture.

“Year I was born,” said Felix.

“Then it’s fate.”

Now the boy read off a series of facts from a small piece of paper he took from his pocket: “MG midget, one thousand five hundred cc Triumph 14 engine, 100,000 on the clock, manual, petrol, two-door roadster, transmission requires—”

Felix couldn’t resist: “Two doors, yeah? Got it.”

Tom blushed appealingly. “My father’s list. Not really a car man myself.”

Felix felt moved to pat him in a friendly way on his high, bony shoulders. “Just messing with you. Can we get a look under the hood?”

It creaked open. Beneath was all the bad news he could have hoped for. The battery overwhelmed by rust, the cylinder cracked. Pistons right through to the engine block.

“Salvageable?” asked Tom. Felix looked perplexed. Tom tried again: “Can it be saved?”

“Depends. What sort of money we talking about?”

Tom looked once more at his piece of paper.

“I’ve been instructed around the thousand mark.”

Felix laughed and reached his hand into the engine. He scratched at the rust with a fingernail.

“To be honest with you, Tom, I see these come in every day, in better condition than yours, much better — for six hundred. No-one’s gonna pay six hundred for this. This one you won’t be able to sell to no-one but a mechanic, I promise you.”

The sun now hit the car directly: the bonnet lit up. Radiant wreck! Tom looked up, squinting.

“Good thing you’re a mechanic, then, isn’t it?”

There was something funny about the way he said it. Both men laughed: Felix in his big gulping way, Tom into his hand like a child. The phone in his pocket started up.

“Oh Jesus — look, it’s not really any skin off my nose, but if I tell my father I took less than seven hundred I’ll never hear the end of it. Personally I’d much rather be back in my bed. Excuse me a second — Soph, I’ll call you back in one minute—” But he kept the phone to his ear and Felix heard more than he wanted to as Tom mimed apologies at him. At the end of the road, a happy roar rose up from a crowd at one of the pub’s outdoor tables. Tom raised his eyebrows quizzically at Felix and made the “lifting a pint” gesture: Felix nodded.

• • •

“What’ll you have?”

“Ginger beer, thanks.”

“Ginger beer and?”

“Nah, that’s it.”

“Look, for me it’s hair of the dog — least you can do is join me.”

“Nah, I’m all right. Just ginger beer.”

“My father says there’s only two sentences a self-respecting Englishman should accept in this situation: I’m on antibiotics and I’m an alcoholic.”

“I’m an alcoholic.”

Felix looked up from the slats of the wooden table. Tom wiped the sweat from his forehead, opened his mouth but said nothing. Felix took a moment to appreciate that his own skin could not broadcast shame so quickly nor so well. Tom’s phone started up again.

Felix rose up from the bench: “Don’t worry, mate, you take your call. I’ll go. Pint, yeah?”

Outside it was a glorious Saturday lunchtime in late summer; inside it was ten o’clock at night on a Tuesday in October. The ceiling black and carved into hexagons, the carpet light-absorbing and dark green. Coffin-wood furniture, ancient and heavy. One old man sat in the corner by the jukebox, in a shabby donkey jacket, with white papery skin and yellow hair and nails, rolling a cigarette — he looked like a cigarette. At the bar, a skinny-legged old girl perched on a stool counted and recounted four piles of twenty-pence pieces. She stopped this activity to stare frankly at Felix, who only smiled back. “All right,” he said, and turned to the barmaid. The old woman sliced suddenly at the towers of coins with the side of her palm. Felix’s reflexes were quick; he saved one pile from flying off the bar altogether. In his peripheral vision he saw Tom heading for the toilets. The barmaid mouthed “sorry” and screwed a finger into her temple. “No worries,” said Felix. He took a cold glass in each hand. He let the barmaid put a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps between his teeth.

• • •

“How old are you, Felix?”

“Thirty-two.”

“But why d’you look younger than me?”

Felix split the bag of crisps down the seam and laid them out on the table.

“Is it. How old are you?”

“Twenty-five. I’m already losing my bloody hair.”

Felix bit down on his straw and smiled round it: “My old man’s the same way. No wrinkles. Genetics.”

“Ah, genetics. Explanation for everything these days.” Tom shielded his eyes with his hand, to make out the sun was bothering him. Felix’s gaze was intense — he met your eyes no matter how you tried to avoid it — and Tom was not used to looking at even his closest friends that way, no matter a perfect stranger to whom he hoped to sell a car. He took a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on. “And how did you get from working in film to mechanic-ing, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I’ve done all sorts, Tom,” said Felix cheerfully, and got his fingers into position to count them off. “Cheffing, that’s where I started — I did a GNVQ in catering, didn’t I — got quite far with that when I was younger; head chef at one point at this little Thai place in Camden, all right place; chucked that in, did a bit of painting and decorating, bit of security, you know, in the clubs, bit of retail, drove a truck delivering them crisps you’re eating round the M25, worked for the Royal Mail,” said Felix, with an accent so peculiar it was hard to imagine who was being impersonated. “Used to make these.” He pointed at his chest. “Then got lucky, got into some stuff — you know the Cot-tes-low?” asked Felix, slowly, as a way of marking all the vital Ts. “It’s a theater,” he explained, abandoning all the Ts and adding an F, “near here. Was front of house for a year, box office that means. Then I was assistant backstage putting the props where they needed to be, all that — that’s how I got into the film thing. Just very very lucky. Always been lucky. But then I really got deep in the drug thing, to tell you the truth, Tom, and I’m just basically picking myself up off the floor from that the past few years, so.”

Tom waited for the bit about the mechanic thing — it didn’t come. Like a man who has been thrown a lot of strange-shaped objects, he clung to the one that struck him first.

“You used to make t-shirts?”

Felix frowned. It was not the thing that usually interested people. He stood up and pulled at his own t-shirt so its faded message at least read straight without creases.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak — is it Polish?”

“Exactly! Says: I Love Polish Girls.”

“Oh. Are you Polish?” asked Tom doubtfully.

That struck Felix as very funny. He fell back in his seat and was a good time repeating the question, slapping the table and laughing, while Tom took quiet sips off the head of his pint like a little bird swooping over a puddle.

“Nah, Tom, nah, not Polish. London born and bred. These I did a long time back — business venture. Five years back — know what? It’s seven. Time flies, innit! Truthfully it was my old man’s idea, I was more like… the money man,” said Felix awkwardly, for it was a bold way to describe his thousand-pound stake, “Each one was in its own language. I love Spanish girls in Spanish, I love German girls in German, I love Italian girls in Italian, I love Brazilian girls in Brazilian—”

“Portuguese,” said Tom, but the list continued.

“I love Norwegian girls in Norwegian, I love Swedish girls in Swedish, I love Welsh girls in Welsh — that was more of a joke one, you get me? — nah, that’s harsh, but you know what I’m saying — I love Russian girls in Russian, I love Chinese girls in Chinese. But there’s two types of Chinese — not many people know that, my mate Alan told me. You got to have both. I love Indian girls in Hindi, and we had a lot of different ones in Arabic, and I love African girls in I think it was Yoruba or something. Got the translations off the Internet.”

“Yes,” said Tom.

“Made three thousand of them and took them to Ibiza, to sell them, didn’t I. Imagine you’re walking through Ibiza town with a t-shirt says I love Italian Girls in Italian! You’d clean up!”

Repeating the idea, with Lloyd’s enthusiasm, as Lloyd had first conveyed it to him, Felix was almost able to forget that they had not cleaned up, that he had lost his stake, along with the good job at the Thai restaurant he had given up, at Lloyd’s insistence, so that he could go to Ibiza. Two thousand five hundred t-shirts still sat in boxes in Lloyd’s cousin Clive’s lock-up, under the railway arches of King’s Cross.

“Tom, what about you?”

“What about me what?”

Felix grinned: “Don’t be shy now. What would I put you down for? Everyone got a type. Let me guess: bet you like some of that Brazilian!”

Tom, somewhat dazzled by the gleaming hardware in Felix’s mouth, said, “I’ll say French,” and wondered what the true answer was, and found it troubling.

“French girls. Right. I’ll throw one of them in with the deal. Still got a few.”

“Isn’t it me who’s making the deal?”

Felix reached over the table and patted Tom on the shoulder.

“Course it is, Tom, course it is.”

The phrase “the drug thing” still hovered over the table. Tom left it alone.

“And are you married, Felix?”

“Not yet. Planning to. That your Missus keeps belling you?”

“Christ, no. We’ve only been going out nine months. I’m only twenty-five!”

“I had two kids when I was your age,” said Felix and flashed the screen of his phone at Tom. “That’s them in their Sunday best. Felix Jr….; he’s a man now himself, almost fourteen. And Whitney, she’s nine.”

“They’re beautiful,” said Tom, though he hadn’t seen anything. “You must be very proud.”

“I don’t see much of them, to tell you the truth. They live with their Mum. We ain’t together. To be honest, me and the mum don’t really get on. She’s one of them real… oppositional women.”

Tom laughed, and then saw that Felix had not meant to be funny.

“Sorry — I just — well, it’s a good phrase for it. I think that may be what I’ve got on my hands. An oppositional woman.”

“Listen, if I told Jasmine: the sky’s blue, she’d say it’s green, you get me?” said Felix, clawing at the label on his bottle of ginger beer. “Got a lot of mental issues. Grew up in care. My mum was in care — same thing. Does something to you. Does something. I known Jasmine since we was sixteen and she was like that from time. Depressed, don’t leave the flat for days, don’t clean, place is like a pigsty, all of that. She’s had a hard time. Anyway.”

“Yes, that must be hard,” said Tom, quietly, and took another large swig of his pint.

After that they sat in silence, both looking out upon the street, as if only accidentally sat together.

“Felix, could I maybe trouble you for one of those? Terrible roller.”

Felix lit his own, nodded and silently started work on another. His phone vibrated in his pocket. He read the message and thrust the handset once more in Tom’s face.

“Oi, Tom, you’re an advertiser — what d’you make of that?”

Tom, who was long-sighted, drew back from the screen in order to read it: “Our records indicate you still haven’t claimed compensation for your accident. You may be entitled up to £3650. To claim free reply ‘CLAIM.’ To opt out text ‘STOP.’”

“Scam, innit.”

“Oh, I should think so, yes.”

“Cos how could they know if I’d had an accident? Evil. Imagine if you were old, or ill, getting that.”

“Yes, said Tom, not really following, “I think they just have these… databases.”

“Databases,” said Felix and shook his head in despair, “and you reply and five quid comes off your bill. But that’s the way people are these days. Everyone’s looking out for themselves. My girl gave me this book, Ten Secrets of Successful Leaders. You read it?”

“No.”

“Should read it. She was like, ‘Fee, you know who reads this book? Bill Gates. The Mafia. The Royal family. Bankers. Tupac read it. Jewish people read this book. Educate yourself.’ She’s a smart one. I’m not even a reader but that one opened my eyes. There you go.”

Tom took the cigarette and lit it and inhaled with the deep relief of a man who had given up smoking entirely only a few hours before.

“Listen — Felix, this is a bit of a weird one,” said Tom, nodding at the packet of Amber Leaf between them, lowering his voice, “But you wouldn’t by any chance have anything stronger? Not to buy, just a pinch. I find it takes the edge off.”

Felix sighed and leaned back into his bench and began murmuring. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

“Oh dear,” said Tom. He cringed to the right, then somehow reversed his body and cringed to the left. “I didn’t mean to—”

“You’re all right. My girl thinks I’ve got an invisible tattoo on my forehead: PLEASE ASK ME FOR WEED. Must have one of them faces.”

Tom lifted his drink and finished it off. Did this mean there was weed or there wasn’t? He examined a distorted Felix through the bottom of his pint glass.

“Well, she sounds sensible,” said Tom, at last. Felix passed him the finished fag.

“Come again?”

“The girl you mentioned, your girlfriend person.”

Felix smiled enormously: “Oh. Grace. Yeah. She is. Never been happier in my life, Tom, to tell you the truth. Changed my life. I tell her, all the time: you’re a lifesaver. And she is.”

Tom held up his ringing phone and gave it the evil eye.

“I seem to be stuck with a life-destroyer.”

“Nobody can do that, Tom. Only you have the power to do that.”

Felix was sincere, but saw he had provoked a sort of smirk in Tom, which in turn provoked in Felix a need to press his point home more strongly: “Listen, this girl changed my outlook totally. Globally. She sees my potential. And in the end, you just got to be the best you that you can be. The rest will follow naturally. I’ve been through it, Tom, right? So I know. The personal is eternal. Think about it.”

How close to superfluous his job was these days! The slogans came pre-embedded, in people’s souls. A smart thought: Tom discreetly congratulated himself for having it. He nodded at Felix deeply, satirically, samurai-style. “Thank you, Felix,” he said, “I’ll remember that. Best you that you can be. Personal equals eternal. You seem like a bloke who’s got it all figured out.” He lifted his empty glass to clink against Felix’s, but Felix was not impervious to irony and left his own glass where it was.

“Seeming ain’t being,” he said quietly and looked away. “Listen—” He drew a folded envelope from his back pocket. “—I’ve got things to do, so…”

The boy saw he had overstepped: “Of course. Look — where were we? You need to make me an offer.”

“You need to give me a reasonable price, mate.”

It was only now that Tom realized he did not, after all, despise Felix’s habit of over-familiarity. On the contrary, to be called “mate” at this late point in their acquaintance felt like a melancholy step down in the world. And why am I only able to enjoy things once they’ve passed, wondered Tom, and tried to place a mental finger upon a hazy quote from a French book, which made exactly this point, and helpfully gave the answer, too. Candide? Proust? Why hadn’t he kept up with his French? He thought of Pere Mercer, on the phone, this morning: “The trouble is you don’t follow through, Tom. That’s always been your trouble.” And of course Sophie was making essentially the same point. Some days have a depressing thematic coherence. Maybe next the cloud overhead would open up and a huge cartoon hand emerge from below, pointing at him, accompanied by a thunderous, authorial voice: TOM MERCER. EPIC FAIL. But it had already been pointed out to him — also this morning! — that this approach, too, was only another kind of trap: “Tom, darling, it’s really terribly narcissistic to think the whole world is against you.” Listening to his mother’s voice down the line he had been impressed by how calm and kind she sounded and how satisfied she was with her diagnosis of his personality. Thank God for his mother! She didn’t take him seriously, and laughed when he was being funny, even when she didn’t understand, as she almost never did. They were country people, his parents, and of grandparental age, for this was a second marriage for them both. They could not conceive of his daily life, did not e-mail, had never heard of Sussex University until he attended it, had no experience of either a “downstairs neighbor,” a “night bus,” the realities of an “unpaid internship” (“Just go in there and present a few ideas, Tom, and show them what you’re worth. At the very least Charlie will listen. We worked together for seven years for Christ’s sake!”) or the sort of nightclub where you leave your clothes — and much else — at the door. They did not have double lives, as far as he could tell. They drank with dinner, never to excess. Where his father found Tom infuriating and inexplicable, his mother went a little gentler on him, at least allowing for the possibility that he really was suffering from some varietal of twenty-first-century intellectual ennui that made it impossible for him to take advantage of the good fortune he’d been born with. There were limits, however. One shouldn’t pretend that Brixton was any sort of place to live. “But Tom: if you’re feeling low, 20 Baresfield is empty until at least July. I don’t know what you have against Mayfair. And you’ll have somewhere to park the car without fear of it being burned to a shell in some riot.” “That was twenty years ago!” “Tom, I refer you to the Aesop fable: leopard, spots.” “That’s not a fable!” “Honestly, I don’t know why you didn’t move into it in the first place.” Because sometimes one wants to have the illusion that one is making one’s own life, out of one’s own resources. He didn’t say that. He said: “Mother, your wisdom surpasseth all understanding.” To which she said, “Don’t be facetious. And don’t make a mess!” But he was making a mess. With this girl. It was all a terrible mess.

“A reasonable price,” repeated Tom and touched the side of his head, as if the strange thoughts were a misfiring synapse, and a tap to the temple might tamp them back down.

“’Cos you’re talking silly money,” said Felix, and began packing away his tobacco and Rizlas and phone in a manner that seemed, to Tom, to perfectly convey disappointment, not only in the failure of the deal, but in Tom himself.

“But you can’t seriously be asking me to give it to you for less than six hundred!”

Halfway through this sentence Tom recognized the strange, inappropriate plea in his own voice.

“Four hundred’s more like it, bruv. My lot will tow it. That’s generous! You wouldn’t get that much for scrap. You’d probably have to pay that much to get it towed.”

The audaciousness of this made Tom smile: “Seriously? Come on. Let’s be serious.”

Felix kept his poker face. Tom, still smiling, put his chin in his hand, and “thought” like a cartoon of somebody “thinking.”

“Five hundred? Then we can both go home. I really can’t go lower than that. It’s an MG!”

“Four fifty. Ain’t going no higher than that.”

Tom’s phone started up once more. He wore an inconclusive expression: he reminded Felix of the actors milling backstage after the matinee, with the evening performance still before them. Not fully in character, but not free of it either.

“Life-destroyer on line one. You’re not easy, Felix. I can see nothing gets past Felix.”

Felix withdrew the crumpled notes and began slowly counting them out into a neat pile.

• • •

So the garage lent you an MG.

Nah, dred, I bought it.

Is it. You must be doing all right.

Weren’t that much. Been saving. Doing it up myself as a gift for Grace project for myself. A project car.

You know why you bought that though, don’t you? Do you know? You don’t know, do you? Do you wanna know? I’m going to impart some wisdom on you, blud, get ready. You think you know why, but you don’t know…

Felix heard it as clearly as any actual conversation with his father: it seemed to exist on the same plane of reality. Maybe it was simply like spotting a train very early, far down the track. The boys at the garage were to pick the car up later today and have it delivered to the resident parking bays in Caldwell. To do that they would have to ask his father for a parking pass. A little after that his father would call him. The prospect of this took the shine off the triumph that should accompany purchase. The further he got down Regent Street the worse it got.

Felix, listen: you can’t buy a woman. You can’t buy her love. She’s gonna leave you that way. Love’s gonna leave you anyway so you might as well not bother with the cars and the jewels. Serious.

Felix passed in front of the Valentine kid with his leg in the air and arrow primed. Who would be happy for him? His thumb hovered over the roller ball on his phone, moving back and forth through the various digits of his siblings, but connecting with each a potential headache that made him hesitate and finally put the handset back in his pocket. Tia would have her children underfoot, and her loneliness and boredom turned easily to jealousy, even for things she cared nothing about, like cars. Ruby would only want to know what the car could do for her — when she could borrow it, where she could drive it. She lived in her twin’s spare room, had nothing and no-one, and pitied herself deeply. She expected charity always, while simultaneously wanting the best of everything. Why’d you buy that wreck? Fool. Both twins had a horror of second-hand goods. Grace, too. He wouldn’t be telling her anything about it until it looked like it had just rolled off the assembly line. Devon was the only one who might be interested, but you couldn’t call him, you had to wait for him to call.

• • •

From Felix’s pocket a digital orchestra played a piece of classical music from an aftershave advert from his childhood. He answered it joyfully, but his love sounded stressed and skipped the hellos. “Did you go see Ricky?” “Nah, sorry — forgot. I’ll call him.” “How you gonna call him? I ain’t got his number — have you?” “When I go back I’ll go past.” “Downstairs called. The leak’s gone through the floor.” “I’ll go see him, chill.” “Where are you?” “At my dad’s.” “You show him? What did he say? Tell him I can order some more copies off the Internet. Actually let me chat to him.” “Yeah, man. He’s looking through it. He’s into it. Told a lot of stories — you know how he is. Trip down memory lane, innit. Listen, I gotta go.” “Put Lloyd on—” An ambulance passed Felix on the street. “I’m on the balcony — he’s in the bathroom. Listen, I’ll call you back in a bit. I gotta go.” “You gotta go! I gotta work.” “True!” The conversation descended into baby talk, and then briefly turned explicit. Grace was fond of proclaiming her “nastiness,” although in bed she was tame, almost prudish, and in their six months together Felix had not quite managed to unite the girl on the phone and the one in his arms. “I love you, baby,” she said, and Felix repeated it passionately, trying to return himself to that moment of optimism before he’d answered the phone. Weird to think she was only a few streets from him, at this moment. Her manager in the background said something about a booking for twelve at two — she was gone again without saying good-bye. Like a ghost on your shoulder and then vanished, the everyday miracle. He remembered when you turned the dial with your finger. Sometimes lines crossed and four ghosts spoke. And now Felix Jr. and his nieces spoke to videos of each other. You wait long enough, the films come true — and everybody acts like it’s nothing. Still, he was glad he got to see the future. Touch and go for a while. A comic book reader, sci-fi fan, it had always been obvious, to Felix, that the future would suit him. Hollywood had nothing on Felix when it came to imagining the future. He didn’t even have to go to the movies anymore, he could just walk down the street like this and see the whole damn spectacular just playing in his mind. Script by Felix Cooper. Directed by Felix Cooper. Starring Felix Cooper.

Anflex, my darling, how will you be getting home?

Particle transfer. See you in a second, my dear Gracian. In a nano-second.

Shit like that. Just rolling in his brain. Sometimes he went and told a whole film in words to Grace, and she was totally into it, and it wasn’t just because she loved him: the fact was that the films in Felix’s mind were blatantly better than anything people paid good money to see. Now Felix collided with a real live young man leaving a glass-walled video emporium, walking backward through the double doors while waving good-bye to his friends, still wrestling with their joysticks. Felix touched the guy gently on the elbows, and the stranger, with equal care, reached back and held Felix where his waist met his back; they both laughed lightly and apologized, called each other “Boss” before separating quickly, the stranger striding back toward Eros, and Felix onwards to Soho.

• • •

On her street he reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and typed: On yr St. U free? The answer came back: Door open.

He had not stood on this street for three months. His phone buzzed again: Five mins please. Why not pick up cigs?

This addition was annoying: it put him back in the wrong position. He made his way over to the unventilated corner shop and spent a hot ten minutes in the queue, trying to finesse the brief speech he thought he had decided on, realizing in fact that he had decided on very little. Why did he need to come down here and say anything at all? She didn’t matter anymore. News of her irrelevance should reach Soho without any effort on his part; she should just walk out of her front door and sniff it in the air. “Don’t need this,” said the woman at the counter. She handed him back fifty pence. Someone behind him sighed; he moved aside quickly with the shame of a Londoner who has inconvenienced, even for a moment, another Londoner. The box of fags was in his pocket. Here was the change in his hand. He couldn’t remember anything about the transaction. He was sweating like a fool.

Outside he tried to calm himself and realign with the exuberant mood in the street. The sun was an incitement, collapsing day into night. Young bluds had stripped to their bare chests as if in a nightclub already. The white boys wore flip-flops and cargo shorts and drank import beers from the bottle. A small gang danced mildly in the doorway of G.A.Y, on autopilot from the night before. Felix chuckled into his chest and leaned against a lamppost to roll a fag. He had the sense that someone was watching and taking it all down (“Felix was a solid bloke, with his heart in the right place, who liked to watch the world go by”) but when that fancy was finished there was nothing else for him to do. A car with tinted windows rolled by. It took a moment to put together the fearful child in the passing reflection with what he knew of his own face. He looked up and over to her door. It was open; two of the girls stood on the doorstep chatting amiably with the Somali drivers, one doorway along. Felix squared his shoulders, put a cheerful limp in his walk. (“Sometimes you got to do what you got to do!”) But there was no kind of smile you could bring to these girls that would make them go easy on you. Chantelle was cutting her eyes at him when he was still twenty yards away. By the time he reached her she had already, as far as she was concerned, dispensed with greetings; she got a grip of his thin hooded top between two fingers, examined its material briefly and then released it again, like a filthy thing picked up off the floor.

“You look summery. Jesus Christ. Mr. Sunshine.”

“This ain’t hot to me tho. I’m skinny — I need the layers.”

“Long time,” said the white one with the sour face, Cherry.

“Been busy.”

“Wouldn’t bother with Her Majesty upstairs, if I were you: get better down here.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Felix, and showed his gold teeth, but he had never been sure if upstairs truly was a separate world. Her Majesty upstairs swore it was. They used to argue about it. It didn’t matter now.

“Can I go?”

They were both big girls and it was their evergreen joke not to move for him, he had to squeeze between them. Felix led with his bony shoulders.

“Like a chicken bone!”

“Pure rib!”

Cherry pinched his backside — three floors up he could still hear cackling. He rounded the last banister. Classical violins were going at it, you could hear taps running hard in the bathroom. At the threshold he was wreathed in steam.

“Felix? Darling, is that you? Door’s open! Is Karenin out there? Bring the bastard in.”

Karenin was on the mat. Felix gathered him sloppily into his arms. The cat’s huge weight kept displacing itself: it wasn’t possible to hold up its backside, belly and neck at the same time, something always fell through the gap. He whispered into its ear—“All right, K”—and stepped inside. This same fat cat in his arms, the yellowing old playbills and photos on the wall, the boxes full of sheet music for a non-existent piano, sold to a pawnshop before even Felix’s time. The old-school everything. He knew it all too well. The grimy sameness, the way nothing was ever refreshed. She called them antiques. Another way of saying there’s no more money. Five years! He dropped the cat down on the chaise: spring-less, the seat sunk to receive it. How did he ever come to know this place? Unknowing it would just be the restoring of things to their natural, healthy state.

“Annie? You coming out?”

“In the bath! S’heavenly. Come in!”

“Nah, you’re all right. I’ll wait.”

“What?”

“I’LL WAIT.”

“Don’t be ludicrous. Bring an ashtray.”

Felix looked about him. On a clothes hanger hooked to the window frame an outfit hung disembodied and flooded with light. Purple jeans, a complicated vest with safety pins on the front, some kind of tartan cape, and below on the floor a pair of yellow leather boots with heels of four or five inches, all of which would be seen by no-one except the boy from the off license who delivered her “groceries.”

“Can’t see no ashtray.”

Piled on top of various envelopes and pages of newspapers were small mountains of spent fags and ash. It was hard to maneuver — some attempt at reorganization was under way. Towers of paper dotted the floor. It was worse than his father’s situation, yet he saw now that the spirit was much the same: a large life contracted into a small space. He had never visited one then the other in quick succession like this. The sense of suffocation and impatience was identical, the longing he had to be free.

“Dear Lord — by the Pavlovas. ‘The Russian bird with the long face.’ Underneath her.”

He would never again have to pretend to be interested in things in which he had no interest. Ballet dancers, novels, the long and torturous history of her family. He stepped over a glass coffee table to where eight photographs of Pavlova formed a diamond on the wall, echoing the pyramid of fags below, the only decoration on a small side table.

“If full, use the plastic bag on the doorknob,” called Annie. “Empty into.”

• • •

He did as he was told. He came into the bathroom, put the packet of fags in the ashtray and the ashtray on the lip of the bath.

“What you got them on for?”

She ran her fingertips along a pair of mother-of-pearl vintage sunglasses: “This is a terribly bright bathroom, Felix. Blinding. Could you? My hands.”

What looked like a single breakfast oat sat on her bottom lip, painted over with scarlet. Felix put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. Even in the few months since he’d last been here the lines under her eyes seemed to have lengthened and deepened, fanning out beyond the shades. The powder she’d doused herself in gathered lumpenly here and there and made everything worse. He retreated to the toilet seat. It was the correct distance. She made a little adjustment to the costume — plumping up the big brown pile of hair, and letting the wet strands fall around her made-up face, framing it. Her narrow shoulders rose out of the bubbles, and he knew every blue vein and brown mole. She was grinning in a certain way that had started the whole thing off, the day he watched her bring up a tray of tea to the film crew on her roof, hair tied in a headscarf like one of those women in the war. The thin lips drawn back and an inch of shiny gum all round.

“How’ve you been, Annie?”

“Sorry?” She cupped her hand facetiously round her ear.

“How’ve you been?”

“How have I been? Is that the question?” She leaned back into the bubbles. “How have I been? How have I been. Well, I’ve been fucking desolate, really.” She tapped some ash, missing the ashtray, dusting the bubbles. “Not entirely due to your disappearance, don’t flatter yourself. Someone at Westminster Council has taken it upon themselves to reevaluate my claim. Because somebody else, some citizen, took it upon themselves to notify the council. My money’s been frozen, I’m reduced to a rather tragic diet of grilled sardines. And various other necessities have been severely reduced…” She made the unhappy face of a child. “Guess who.”

“Barrett,” said Felix sullenly; he would have her in any mood but this one. He discreetly scanned the room, and soon found what he was looking for: the rolled-up twenty and the vanity mirror, peeking out from behind a leg of the old-fashioned tub.

“He’s trying to bankrupt me, I suppose. So they can all just get on with charging some—”

“Russian a thousand a week,” murmured Felix, matching her word for word.

“I’m sorry I’m so boring.”

She stood up. If it was a challenge he was equal to it. He watched the suds slink down her body. She had a dancer’s frame, with all the curves at the back. What he was now confronted with had only a pale utility to it: breasts, like two muscles, sitting high above a carriage of stringent pulleys and levers, all of it designed for a life that never happened.

“You might pass a girl a towel.”

A dingy rag hung over the door. He tried to reach around her to drape it chastely over her shoulders, but she sunk into his body, soaking him.

“Brrrr. That’s cozy.”

“Fuckssake!”

She whispered into his ear: “The good news is if they claim I’m out and about I might as well go out and about. We might as well.”

Felix stepped back, got on his hands and knees and stretched an arm under the bath.

“According to them I’ve already been out. I’m in Heaven every night dancing it up with the Twinks, without my knowledge. Sleep-living. Maybe this is the start of a whole new life for me! For God’s sake, what are you doing down there? Oh, don’t be such a bore, Felix. Leave that alone…”

Felix re-emerged holding a silver-handled mirror from a fairy tale with four thick lines of powder cut along it, crossed by a straw, like a coat of arms. Annie stretched her arms out toward him with the wrists turned up. The veins seemed bigger, bluer.

“Not even lunch time.”

“On the contrary, that is lunch. Do you mind terribly putting it back where you found it?”

They stood either side of the toilet: the obvious gesture suggested itself. It would be one way of saying what he had to say.

“Put. It. Back. Please.” Annie smiled with all her showgirl teeth. Someone was knocking at the door. Felix spotted a wayward shiver in her eyelid, a struggle between the pretense of lightness and the reality of weight. He knew all about that struggle. He put it back. “Coming!”

She grabbed a silk Japanese thing off a hook on the door and slipped into it, folding one side into the other so as to hide a gigantic rip. It had a flock of swallows on the back, swooping from her neck down her spine to the floor. She ran out, shutting Felix in. Out of habit he opened the glass-fronted cabinet above the sink. He pushed the first row aside — Pond’s Cream, Elizabeth Arden, an empty, historic bottle of Chanel No.5—to reach the medications behind. Picked up a bottle of poxywhadyacallitrendridine, the one with the red cap which, if mixed with alcohol, had a manic-mellow buzz, like ketamine-laced Ecstacy. Worked very well with vodka. He held it in his hand. He put it back in its place. From the other room he heard her, suddenly strident: “Well, no… I really don’t see that at all…”

Bored, Felix wandered in and parked himself on an uncomfortable high-backed wooden chair that once graced the antechamber of Wentworth Castle.

“I barely use the stairs. It may be a ‘shared area’ but I don’t use it. My only traffic is the occasional deliveryman or friend coming up. Very occasional. I don’t go down, I can’t. Surely the people you should be talking to are the ladies downstairs, who, as we both know — I’m assuming you’re a man of the world — have people stomping up and down constantly. Up, down, up, down. Like Piccadilly bloody Circus.”

She stepped forward to demonstrate, with a finger, this popular right of way, and Felix got a glimpse of the man in the doorway: a big blonde, buff from the gym, in a navy suit, holding a ring binder that said Google on it.

“Miss Bedford, please, I am only doing my job.”

“Sorry — what’s your name? Can I see some sort of official…”

The blonde passed Annie a card.

“Do you have instructions to come and harass me? Do you? I don’t think you do, Mr. — I can’t possibly pronounce that name — I don’t think you do, Erik. Because I’m afraid I don’t answer to Mr. Barrett. I answer to the actual landlord — I’m a relative of the actual landlord, as in the lord of the land. He’s a close relative, and I’m quite sure he wouldn’t want me harassed.”

Erik opened his ring binder and closed it again.

“We’re the sub-agents, and we’re instructed to advise the tenants that the shared areas are to be improved and the cost split between the flats. We’ve sent several letters to this address and received no reply.”

“What a funny accent you have. Is it Swedish?”

Erik stood almost to attention: “I am from Norway.”

“Oh, Norwegian! Norway. Lovely. I’ve never been, obviously — I never go anywhere. Felix,” she said turning round, with a louche lean into the doorframe, “Erik is Norwegian.”

“Is it,” said Felix. He moved his jaw rigidly in impersonation of hers. She stuck her tongue out at him.

“Now Erik, is it Sweden that had all the recent trouble?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, Norway. Oh, you know, with the money. Hard to believe a whole nation can go bankrupt. It happened to my aunt Helen, but of course she was really asking for it. A whole country seems rather… careless.”

“You are speaking of Iceland, I think.”

“Am I? Oh, perhaps I am. I always get the Nordic ones sort of…” Annie tangled her fingers together.

“Miss Bedford—”

“Look, the point is, nobody wants to see this place tarted up more than me — I mean, we haven’t had a film crew here since — whenever that was — and that roof is crying out to be filmed from, it really is, it’s just absurd to leave it lying fallow. It’s one of the best views in London. I really think it would be in your interests to make the place more attractive to outside investment. You’ve been very slack indeed as far as outside investment is concerned.”

Erik shrank a little in his cheap suit. It didn’t matter what nonsense came out of her mouth, her accent worked a spell. Felix had seen it magic her out of some unpromising corners, even when the benefits people turned up, even when the police raided the brothel downstairs while a sizable bag of heroin sat just out of sight on her night table. She could talk anybody away from her door. She could fall and fall and fall and still never quite hit the ground. Her great uncle, the earl, owned the ground, beneath this building, beneath every building on the street, the theater, the coffee houses, the McDonald’s.

“The idea that a vulnerable woman who lives alone and barely leaves her apartment is required to pay the same amount as a group of ‘business’ ladies who entertain their male visitors approximately every eight minutes — I think it’s incredible. Stomp stomp stomp,” she shouted, and marched out a rhythm on the doorstep. “That’s what’s wearing the bloody carpet away. Stomp stomp stomp. Gentleman callers on the stair.” Erik looked over — a little desperately — at Felix. “That,” said Annie, pointing, “is not a gentleman caller. That is my boyfriend. His name is Felix Cooper. He is a filmmaker. And he does not live here. He lives in North West London, a dinky part of it you’ve probably never heard of called Willesden, and I can tell you now you’d be wrong to dismiss it actually because actually it’s very interesting, very ‘diverse.’ Lord, what a word. And the fact is, we’re both very independent people from quite different walks of life and we simply prefer to keep our independence. It’s really not so unusual, is it, to have—”

Here Felix jumped up, passed his hands around Annie’s waist, and drew her back into the room. With a sigh she wilted into the chaise and gave all her attention to Karenin, who looked like he considered it no less than his due. Erik opened his binder, detached a sheaf of papers and pushed them toward Felix.

“I need Miss Bedford to sign this. It obligates her to pay her share of the works that—”

“You need it right now?”

“I need it this week, for sure.”

“This is what we’ll do. Leave it here, right? Come back for it, end of the week — it’ll be signed, promise you.”

“We have sent many letters—”

“I appreciate that — but — she’s not well, boss. She ain’t in her right… she’s got this agrophobia,” said Felix, an old error no amount of Annie’s eye-rolling had been able to correct, maybe because his portmanteau version expressed a deeper truth: she wasn’t really afraid of open spaces, she was afraid of what might happen between her and the other people in them. “Come back later, it’ll be signed. I’ll get it signed.”

“Well, that was dull,” said Annie, before the door had quite shut. “I’ve been thinking, Felix — ever since the sun came out — let’s spend what’s left of this summer on my roof. We used to love knocking around up there. This weekend, stay over — Monday’s the bank holiday! Long weekend.”

“It’s carnival this weekend.”

But this she didn’t seem to hear: “Not with a lot of people. Just us. We’ll make that chicken thing you like, barbecue up there. Jerk. Jerk chicken. For us two jerks.”

“You eating now as well?”

Annie stopped laughing, flinched, turned her face. She crossed her hands delicately in her lap. “It’s always nice to watch other people eat. I eat mushrooms. We could get some of those legal mushrooms. Do you remember? Just trying to get from here to there”—she pointed from the chair to the chaise—“took about a year. I was convinced this was France, for some reason. I felt I needed a passport to cross the room.”

Felix reached for his tobacco. He would not be drawn into fond reminiscences.

“Can’t buy ’em anymore. Government shut it down. Few months ago.”

“Did they? How boring of them.”

“Some kid in Highgate thought he was a TV and switched himself off. Jumped off that bridge. Hornsey Lane Bridge.”

“Oh, Felix, that one’s as old as I am — I heard that in the playground of Camden School for Girls in about 1985. ‘Suicide Bridge.’ It’s what’s called an urban myth.” She walked over to him, took off his cap and rubbed his shaved head. “Let’s go up there right now, and tan. Well, I’ll tan. You can sweat. Inaugurate the summer.”

“Annie, man: summer’s almost over. I’m working. All the time.”

“You don’t appear to be working now.”

“Usually I’d be working Saturdays.”

“Well let’s do another day then, you choose, make it regular, like,” said Annie, in her idea of a Northern accent.

“Can’t do it.”

“Is it my charms he can’t resist”—an American accent—“or my roof?”

“Annie — sit down, I want to talk to you. Serious.”

“Talk to me on the roof!”

He tried to grab her wrist, but she quickened and passed him. He followed her into the bedroom. She had pulled down the ladder from the trapdoor in the ceiling and was already halfway up.

“No peeking!” But she made her way up in a manner that made it impossible not to, including the little white mouse-tail of a tampon’s string. “Be careful — glass.”

Felix emerged into light — it took a moment to see clearly. He placed his knee carefully — between one broken beer bottle and another — and pulled himself up. His hands came away covered with white flakes of sun-baked, rain-ruined wood. He had helped lay this deck, and painted it, along with a few techies and even one of the producers, because time and the budget were so tight. Everything covered in a thick white gloss to maximize the light. It was done very quickly, to service a fiction. It was never intended for use in the real world. Now she picked up a crushed cigarette packet and an empty bottle of vodka, fastidiously cramming them into an overflowing bin, as if the removal of these two items could make a serious difference to the sea of crap everywhere. Felix stepped over a sodden sleeping bag, heavy with water and filled with something, not a person, thank God. It had rained last night — there was a dewy freshness — but a serious smell was coming, and every minute of the sun made it slightly more serious. Felix headed for the far eastern corner, by the chimney, for its shade and relative unpopularity. The boards under his feet made desperate noises.

“This all needs redoing.”

“Yes. But you just can’t find the help these days. Once upon a time you’d get a lovely young film crew turning up, they’d pay you two thousand pounds a week, lay a deck, paint it, fuck you passionately and tell you they loved you — but that kind of service is a thing of the past, I’m afraid.”

Felix put his head in his hands.

“Annie, man. You give me jokes, for real.”

Annie smiled sadly: “I’m glad I still give you something, at least…” She righted an upturned deckchair. “Looks a bit rough at the moment, I know… But I’ve been entertaining — I had one of my big nights, last Friday, such a nice time, you should have been here. I did send a text. You contrive not to see my texts. Lovely crowd, the sweetest people. Hot as Ibiza up here.”

She made it sound like a society party, filled with the great and good. Felix picked up an empty bottle of Strongbow cider that had been repurposed into a bong.

“You need to stop letting people take advantage.”

Annie snorted: “What nonsense!” She sat wide legged on the little bridge of bricks between the chimney stacks. “That’s what people are for. They take advantage of each other. What else are they for?”

“They’re only hanging round you because you’ve got something they want. Soho liggers. Just want somewhere to crash. And if there’s free shit — bonus.”

“Good. That’s what I’ve got. Why shouldn’t people take advantage of me if what I have is useful to them?” She crossed one leg over the other like a teacher reaching the substance of her lecture. “It happens that in this matter of property and drugs I am strong and they are weak. In other matters it’s the other way round. The weak should take advantage of the strong, don’t you think? Better that than the other way round. I want my friends to take advantage. I want them to feed off me. I want them drinking my blood. Why not? They’re my friends. What else am I to do in this place? Raise a family?”

That line of conversation Felix knew to be a trap. He swerved to avoid it.

“I’m saying they ain’t your friends. They’re users.”

Annie fixed him with a look over her shades: “You sound very sure. Are you speaking from personal experience?”

“Why you trying to mix up my words?” He was easily flustered and it mistranslated as anger. People thought he was on the verge of hitting someone when he was only nervous, or slightly annoyed. Annie lifted a shaky finger into the air.

“Don’t raise your voice at me, Felix. I hope you haven’t come round here for a fight because I’m feeling really quite delicate.”

Felix groaned and sat next to her on the bridge of bricks. He put his hand softly on her knee, meaning it like a father or friend, but she grabbed it and held it tightly in her own.

“Can you see? Over there? Flag’s up. Somebody’s home. Best view in town.”

“Annie—”

“My mother was presented at the palace, you know. And my grandmother.”

“Is it.”

“Yes, Felix, it is. Surely I’ve told you that before.”

“Yeah, you have, as it goes.”

He worked his hand free and stood up again.

“They flee from me that sometime did me seek,” said Annie quietly, removed her robe and lay naked in the sun. “There’s some vodka in the freezer.”

“I told you I don’t drink no more.”

“Still?”

“I told you. That’s why I ain’t been round. Not just that, other reasons, too. I’m clean. You should think about it yourself.”

“But darling, I am clean. Two years clean.”

“Cept the coke, weed, drink, pills…”

“I said I’m clean, not a bloody Mormon!”

“I’m talking about doing it properly.”

Annie got up on her elbows and pushed her shades into her hair: “And spend every day listening to people bang on about the time they found themselves in a bin covered with vomit? And pretend that every good time I’ve ever had in my life was some kind of extended adolescent delusion?” She lay back down and replaced the shades. “No thank you. Could you fetch me a vodka please? With lemon, if you can find it.”

Diagonally across the street from them, on another roof terrace, a severely dressed Japanese woman — narrow black trousers and black V-neck — dropped a tray she was carrying. A glass smashed and one plate of food went flying; the other she somehow managed to hold on to. She had been heading for a small wrought-iron table at which sat a lanky Frenchman, in parodic red braces with his jeans rolled up to the calf. Now he jumped up. At the same moment a little girl ran out, looked at this domestic tragedy and put her hand over her mouth. They were all three familiar to Felix; he’d seen them many times over the years. First her alone; then he moved in. Then the baby turned up, who looked now to be four or five years old. Where had the time gone? Quite often, in good weather, he had watched the woman take pictures of her family on a proper camera set atop a tripod base.

“Oops,” said Annie, “trouble in paradise.”

“Annie, listen: remember that girl I was telling you about. The serious one.”

“I’m afraid it really does serve them right. They couldn’t just eat in their flat. That would be too much of a hardship. Instead they have to bring up each piece of individually miso-stained balsamic glaze cod fillet up on a tray, so they can eat them on the sodding terrace, all the time no doubt saying to themselves: how lucky we are to be eating on the terrace! Why, we could be in Tuscany! Have you tried these, darling? They’re tempura zucchini flowers. Japanese-Italian fusion! My own invention. Shall I photograph it? We can put it on our blog.”

“Annie.”

“Our blog called Jules et Kim.”

“Me and that girl. Grace. It’s serious. I’m not going to be coming round here no more.”

Annie held a hand up in the air and seemed to examine her nails, though each one was lower than the finger’s tip, with skin torn from either side and old blood-tracks all round the cuticles. “I see. Didn’t she have another lover, too?”

“That’s done with.”

“I see,” said Annie again, rolled onto her stomach and kicked her feet with their extraordinary arches into the air. “Age?”

Felix couldn’t help but smile: “Twenty-four, coming up, I think. In November. But it ain’t even about that.”

“And still no vodka.”

Felix sighed and started walking back to the trapdoor.

“I shall think of the other lover!” he heard Annie call after him as he descended. “I shall pity him! It’s so important that we pity each other!”

Marlon. It was done with finally on a Sunday in February while Felix sat on Grace’s stairwell, rolling a fag and shivering, peeking through the net curtain. The man had watched the other man as he trudged through the flat, collecting a bike lock, some ugly clothes, a music dock for an iPod, a pair of hair clippers. He was heavy, Marlon, not fat exactly, but soft and ungainly. He was a long time in the bathroom, re-emerging with several jars of wax and tubes of cream, at least one of which was Felix’s — but Felix had won the woman and considered he could live without his Dax. After Marlon was done retrieving his things, Felix watched him as he took Grace’s hands in his own like a man about to perform a religious ritual and said, “I’m thankful for the time we spent together.” Poor Marlon. He really didn’t have a fucking clue. He even turned up a few times after that — with mix-tapes of soca music, and handwritten notes, and tears. None of which helped his case. In the end, all the things Grace claimed to like about Marlon — that he was not a “playa,” that he was gentle and awkward and not interested in money — were all the reasons she left him. Being so gentle, it was a while before he got the message. Finally he had taken his “I’m-a-male-nurse-I-find-hip-hop-too-negative-I-can-cook-curried-goat-I-want-to-move-to-Nigeria” routine back to South London where, in Felix’s opinion, it belonged.

“Fridge,” said Felix to himself now and opened it — two family-sized bottles of Diet Coke, three lemons and a can of mackerel — and then remembered, and opened the freezer instead. He lifted out the bottle of vodka. He returned to the fridge and removed the least white lemon. He looked about him. The kitchen was a tiny cupboard with a cracked Belfast sink and no space to store anything and no bin. The sink was full; there were no clean glasses. A curtain-rag fluttered at the half-open window. A line of ants processed from the sink to the window and back, carrying little specks of food on their backs, with a confidence that suggested they did not expect to see tap water here in their lifetimes. Felix found a mug. He sawed at the lemon with a blunt knife. He poured the vodka. He put the top back on, replaced the bottle in the freezer and thought of how he would describe this scene of sobriety on Tuesday at seven pm to a group of fellow travellers who would appreciate its heroic quality.

Back up on the roof Annie had changed position — a cross-legged yoga pose, eyes closed — and was now wearing a green bikini. He placed the mug in front of her and she nodded, like a goddess accepting an offering.

“Where’d you get that bikini?”

“Questions, questions.”

Without opening her eyes she pointed at the family on the terrace. “Now all that’s left to them is to pick up the pieces. Lunch has been ruined, the Sancerre runs dry, but somehow, somehow, they’ll find a way to carry on.”

“Annie—”

“And what else? I’ve no idea what’s up with you anymore. Any movement on the film front? How’s your brother?”

“I left that place time ago. I’m apprenticed at this garage now, I told you.”

“Vintage cars are a nice hobby. “

“Not a hobby — it’s my work.”

“Felix: you’re a very talented filmmaker.”

“Come on, man. What was my job? Getting the coffees, getting the coke. That was my job. That was it. They weren’t gonna let me get no further than that, believe. Why you always going on about shit that ain’t even real?”

“I just happen to feel you’re very talented, that’s all. And that you criminally undersell yourself.”

“Leave it, man!”

Annie sighed and took the clip out of her hair. She separated the hair into sections and started working on two long, childish plaits. “How’s poor Devon doing?”

“Fine.”

“You’re mistaking me for one of those people who ask questions out of politeness.”

“He’s fine. He’s got a provisional release date: 16th June.”

“But that’s wonderful!” cried Annie, and Felix felt a great, impractical warmth toward her. In Grace’s company Devon was rarely mentioned. He was one of the “negative sources of energy” they were meant to be cleansing from their lives.

“Why ‘provisional?’”

“Depends on how he acts. He has to not piss anyone off between now and then.”

“If you ask me, he seems to have somewhat overpaid his debt to society for a little stick-em-up with a toy shooter.”

“It weren’t a toy. It was unloaded. They still call it armed robbery.”

“Oh, but someone on Friday told me the funniest joke — you’d like it. Oh gosh: wording. Something like: do you know what poor people…? No. Sorry, start again. Poor people — Oh God: ‘In poor areas people steal your phone. In rich areas the people steal your pension.’” Felix smiled minutely. “Only, it was much better done than that.”

She was shouting, without realizing it. Over on the other terrace, the Japanese woman turned and peered politely into the middle distance.

“I mean, look at this woman: she’s obsessed with me. Look at her. She desperately wants to photograph me but can’t bear to ask. It’s very sad, really.” Annie waved a hand at the woman and her family. “Eat your lunch! Proceed with your lives!”

Felix put himself between Annie and the view. “She’s half Jamaican, half Nigerian. Her mum teaches at William Keble down Harlesden way — serious woman. She’s like her mum, she’s got that Nigerian education thing: focused. You’d like her.”

“Hmmm.”

“You know that place York’s on Monmouth Street?”

“Naturally. People went there in the eighties.”

“She just got promoted,” said Felix, proudly. “She’s like the top waitress, what do you call that again? She doesn’t do the tables no more. What do you call that?”

“Maitre D.”

“Yeah. Probably end up managing it. It’s full every day — lots of people go there.”

“Yes, but what type of people?” Annie put her drink to her lips and knocked it back in one. “Anything else?”

Felix got flustered again: “We got a lot in common, like… just a lot of things.”

“Long walks in the country, red wine, the operas of Verdi, GSOH…” Annie held her arms wide and put her fingers together as in a yogic chant.

“She’s knows what she’s about. She’s conscious.”

Annie looked at him oddly: “That’s setting the bar rather low, don’t you think? I mean, bully for you she’s not in a coma…”

Felix laughed, and spotted her grinning gummily with pleasure.

“Politically conscious, racially conscious, as in she gets it, the struggle. Conscious.”

“She’s awake and she understands,” Annie closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “Bully for you.”

But some flicker of imperiousness in her face tipped Felix over. He started shouting.

“All you know how to do is take the piss. That’s all you know. What you doing that’s so amazing? What you getting accomplished?”

Annie opened one startled eye: “What am I — what on earth are you talking about? I was joking, for Godssake. What exactly am I meant to be getting accomplished?”

“I’m talking about what are your goals? What do you want for your life to be like?”

“What do I want for my life to be like? I’m sorry, grammatically I’m finding that question extremely peculiar.”

“Fuck you, Annie.”

She tried to laugh this off, too, and reached out for his wrist, but he pushed her away: “Nah, but there’s no point with you, is there? I’m trying to tell you where I’m going in my life, and you’re just taking the piss. Pointless. You’re pointless.”

It came out more brutal than he’d meant. She winced.

“I think you’re being very cruel. I’m only trying to understand.”

Felix took it down a notch. He didn’t want to be cruel. He didn’t want to be seen to be cruel. He sat down next to her. He had his speech prepared, but also the sense that they were both speaking lines, that really she was as prepared as he was.

“I’m tired of living the way I been living. I been feeling like I’ve been in the game, at this level, and I had a good time at this level — but, come on, Annie: even you would say it’s a level with a lot of demons. A lot of demons. Demons and—”

“Excuse me — you’re talking to a nice Catholic girl, who—”

“Let me finish talking! For one time!”

Annie nodded mutely.

“Lost my thread now.”

“Demons,” said Annie.

“Right. And I’ve killed them. And it was hard, and now they’re dead and I’ve completed the level, and it’s time to move to the next level. It ain’t even a matter of taking you to the next level. You blatantly don’t want to go.”

This was the speech he had prepared. Now it was out of his mouth it didn’t seem to have the subtle depth it had taken on in his mind, but still he saw it had had some effect: her eyes were open and her yoga pose was over, arms unfolded, hands flat on the floor.

“You listening? Next level. People can spend their whole lives just dwelling. I could spend my whole life dwelling on some of the shit that’s happened to me. I done that. Now it’s time for the next level. I’m moving up in the game. And I’m ready for it.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve grasped the metaphor, you don’t have to keep repeating it.” Annie lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and exhaled it through her nose. “Life’s not a video game, Felix — there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is everybody dies at the end. Game over.”

The few clouds left in the sky were shunting toward Trafalgar. Felix looked up at them with what he hoped was a spiritual look upon his face. “Well, that’s your opinion, innit. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion.”

“Mine, Nietzsche’s, Sartre’s, a lot of people. Felix, darling, I appreciate you coming here for this ‘serious talk’ and sharing your thoughts about God, but I’m quite bored of talking now and personally I’d really like to know: are we going to fuck today or not?”

She pulled playfully at his leg. He tried to get up, but she started kissing up his ankles and he soon sunk back down on his knees. It was a defeat, and he blamed her. He got her by the shoulders, not gently, and together they scrabbled to the edge of the wall, where they told themselves they couldn’t be seen. He had a handful of her hair tight in his fist, and tried to land a harsh kiss but she had the knack of turning every malevolent stroke into passion. They fit together. They always had. But what was the point of fitting in this way and no other? He felt her hands on his shoulders, pushing him lower, and soon he was level with her appendix scar. She lifted her arse. He grabbed it with both hands and put his face in her crotch. Fourteen when Lloyd first explained that to eat a woman was unhygienic, a humiliation. Only at gunpoint, that was his father’s opinion, and even then only if every last hair has been removed. Annie was the first time. Years of conditioning broken in an afternoon. He wondered what Lloyd might think of him now, with his nose nestled in so much abundant straight hair, and this strange taste in his mouth.

“If it’s in the way, just take it out!”

He grabbed the mouse-tail between his teeth and pulled. It came out easily. He left it like a dead thing, red on the white deck. He turned back to her and dug in with his tongue. He looked like he was frantically tunnelling somewhere and hoping to reach the other side. She tasted of iron, and when he came up for air five minutes later he imagined a ring of blood around his mouth. In fact there was only a speck; she kissed it away. The rest was quick. They were old lovers and had their familiar positions. On their knees, looking out over town, they came swiftly to reliably pleasurable, reliably separate, conclusions, that were yet somehow an anticlimax when compared to those five minutes, five minutes ago, when it had seemed possible to climb inside another person, head first, and disappear entirely.

Afterward he lay on top of her feeling the unpleasant, sweaty closeness, wondering when it would be polite to move. He did not wait very long. He rolled over onto his back. She swept her hair to one side and put her head on his chest. They watched a police helicopter pass by on its way to Covent Garden.

“I’m sorry,” said Felix.

“Whatever for?”

Felix reached down and pulled his jeans back up. “You still taking your thing?”

Felix saw a flash of fury pass over her face, and also how it was contained and dispersed in the action of opening the cigarettes, tapping one out, lighting it, smiling grimly, laughing.

“No need. More chance of being struck by lightning. The blood just about still runs, but trust me: the well is almost dry. Nature, the enforcer. The destroyer! Speaking of which, dear brother James is meant to be taking me out to The Wolseley for a celebration of our mutual decrepitude — he phoned up yesterday, completely natural on the phone. You’d think we spoke every other day. Just ridiculous. But I played along, I said, ‘Hello, twin dear!’ He suggests a birthday lunch — our birthday’s not till October, mind you — and I say fine, but of course I know precisely what he’s up to, he wants me to sign the bloody deed so he can sell out from under me. He doesn’t seem to understand that no matter what he thinks a part of that place is mine and who knows how much he’s already mortgaged it to pay for his little darlings’ education, up to the hilt, I’m sure, I doubt there’s a penny left in it, and we all know he wished he’d gobbled me up in the womb, but I’m afraid he didn’t manage it and as long as our mother is alive I really don’t see why it should be sold — where is she to go if it is? And who’s going to pay for it? That kind of care costs money. But he’s always been like that: James has always acted like he is an only child and I don’t exist at all. Do you know what he and Daddy used to call me behind my back? The afterbirth. Shall we have another drink? It’s so muggy.”

She lay back down on his chest. She kissed the skin round the neck of his t-shirt. He put his fingers in her hair.

“You should probably take one of them other pills — the ones you take after. To be safe.”

Annie made an exasperated sound.

“I don’t want your babies, Felix. I can assure you I’m not sitting up here like some tragic fallen woman every night dreaming of having your babies.” She began tracing a figure of eight with her fingernail along his stomach. The movement looked idle but the nail pressed in hard. “You realize of course that if it were the other way round there would be a law, there would be an actual law: John versus Jen in the high court. And John would put it to Jen that she did wilfully fuck him for five years, before dumping him without warning in the twilight of his procreative window, and taking up with young Jack-the-lad, only twenty-four years old and with a cock as long as my arm. The court rules in favor of John. Every time. Jen must pay damages. Huge sums. Plus six months in jail. No — nine. Poetic justice. And you wouldn’t be able to—”

“You know what? I should chip.” He slid her head off his body, pulled his t-shirt down and stood. She sat up and crossed her arms over her breasts. She looked in the direction of the river.

“Yes, why don’t you?”

He reached down to kiss her good-bye but she jerked her head away like a child.

“Why you being like that? I’ve got to go, that’s all.” Felix felt something was off: he looked down and saw his zip was open. He pulled it closed. It occurred to him that he had said and done exactly the opposite of all he’d intended to say and do ever since he walked through her door.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No need. I’m fine. Next time bring your Grace lady. I like conscious types. They’re so much livelier. I find that most people are in a semi-vegetative state.”

“I’m really sorry.” Felix kissed her on the forehead.

He started walking toward the trapdoor. After a moment he heard footsteps coming up behind, and saw the flicker of her dressing gown, a few silk swallows on the wing, then a hand clamping down on his shoulder.

“You know, Felix”—a dainty little voice, like a waitress reciting the specials—“not everyone wants this conventional little life you’re rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire. And when it’s time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flames and be consumed. I’m not afraid! I’ve never been afraid. Most people are, you know. But I’m not like most people. You’ve never done anything for me and I don’t need you to do anything for me.”

“Never done anything for you? When you was lying on this roof, dribbling out your mouth, with your eyes rolling back in your head, who was here, who put their fingers—”

Annie’s nostrils flared and her face turned cruel: “Felix: what is this pathological need of yours to be the good guy? It’s very dull. Frankly, you were more fun when you were my dealer. You don’t have to save my life. Or anyone’s life. We’re all fine. We don’t need you to ride in on a white horse. You’re nobody’s savior.”

They were speaking softly enough, but putting their hands on each other, more and more violently, and pulling them off, and Felix realized it was happening, it was bad as it could be, the dreaded scene that had kept him from this place for months, and the strange thing was how precisely he knew what it was like to be Annie at this moment — he had been in Annie’s role many times, with his mother, with other women — and the more he understood it the more he wanted to escape her, as if losing in the way she was losing right now was a kind of virus and pity the way you caught it.

“You act like we’re in a relationship, but this ain’t a relationship. I’m in a relationship — that’s what I come here to tell you. But this? This ain’t shit, it’s nothing, it’s—”

“Christ, another hideous word! God save me from ‘relationships!’”

Desperate now to leave, Felix played what he believed was his trump card. “You’re forty-whatever. Look at you. You’re still living like this. I want to have kids. I want to get on with my life.”

Annie forced out some approximation of a laugh: “You mean ‘more kids,’ don’t you? Or are you one of these optimistic souls who feels they become a new person every seven years, once the cells have regenerated — blank page, start again — never mind who you hurt, never mind what went on before. Now it’s time for my new relationship.”

“I’m out,” said Felix, and began walking away.

“What a mealy-mouthed pathetic word, ‘relationship.’ For people who haven’t the guts to live, haven’t the imagination to fill their three score and ten with anything other than—”

Felix knew better than to get into it: he had no more cards and she was anyway playing by herself. When she was like this she could have an argument with a coat-stand, with a broom. And how could he know how much she’d taken before he’d even turned up? Now he turned from her and opened the trap door and made his way down, but she followed him.

“It’s what people do these days, isn’t it? When they can’t think of anything else to do. No politics, no ideas, no balls. Get married. But I’ve transcended all that. Long time ago. Eons ago. This idea that all your happiness lies in this other person. This idea of happiness! I’m on a different plane of consciousness, darling. I’ve got more balls than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I was engaged at 19, I was engaged at 23, I could be moldering in some Hampshire pile at this very moment, covering and recovering sofas with some Baron in perfect sexless harmony. That’s what my people do. While your lot have a lot of babies they can’t afford or take care of. I’m sure it’s all perfectly delightful, but you can count me the fuck out!”

In the hall between the bedroom and lounge, Felix turned round and grabbed both her wrists. He was shaking. He hadn’t realized till now what he wanted. Not just that she lose, but that she not exist.

“You’re lucky that you find life easy, Felix. You’re lucky that you’re happy, that you know how to be happy, that you’re a good person — and you want everyone to be happy and good because you are, and to find things easy because you do. Does it never occur to you some people might not find life as easy to live as you do?”

She looked triumphant. He watched her coke-jaw grinding against itself.

“My life? My life is easy?”

“I didn’t say it was easy. I said you find it easy. There’s a difference. That’s why I like the ballet: it’s hard for everybody. Felix, let go, it hurts.”

Felix let go. Touching each other for so long, even in anger, made the anger unsustainable, and they both softened, and lowered their voices, and looked away.

“I’m in the way, I see that. Well. No harm done. By which I mean of course: nothing but harm done.”

“Every time I come round here, same drama. Same drama.” Felix shook his head at the floor. “I don’t get it. I never been nothing but nice to you. Why you trying to ruin my life?”

She gave him a penetrating look.

“How funny,” she said, “but of course that’s how it must seem to you.”

After that they walked to the door quite calmly, the man slightly ahead. A stranger coming across the scene would have thought the man had tried to sell the woman a bible or set of encyclopedias, with no success. For his own part, Felix felt absolute certainty that this was the last time — the last time of passing this picture, the last time seeing that crack in the plaster — and in his mind he said a little prayer of thanks. He almost wished he could tell the woman he loved all about it, so fine an example was it of all that she had taught him. The universe wants you to be free. You must shake yourself free of the negative. The universe wants only that you ask, so that you shall receive. Behind him now he heard this woman quietly weeping. It was his cue to turn round, but he didn’t, and at the threshold the weeping became a sob. He hurried to the stairs, and was a few steps down when he heard a thud on the carpet above as she went down on her knees, and he knew he was meant to feel heavy, but the truth was he felt like a man undergoing some not-yet-invented process called particle transfer, wonderfully, blissfully light.

NW6

Felix inched deeper into the carriage. He gripped the safety rail. He considered the tube map. It did not express his reality. The center was not “Oxford Circus” but the bright lights of Kilburn High Road. “Wimbledon” was the countryside, “Pimlico” pure science fiction. He put his right index finger over Pimlico’s blue bar. It was nowhere. Who lived there? Who even passed through it?

Two seats came free in a bank of four. Felix roused himself and sat down. The guy opposite nodded to a loud break-beat. His friend next to him put his feet up on the seat. Pupils enormous, laughing into his neck every now again, amused by some private delirium. Felix established a private space of his own, opening his legs wide and slouching. At Finchley Road, as underground came over ground, his phone revived, bleeping to register a missed call. His thumb worked hopefully down the list. Same number, three times. It had only one physical referent in the world: a battered public call box, riveted to a wall, halfway down a concrete corridor. He had seen it many times through the reinforced glass of the visiting room. He put his mobile back into his pocket.

• • •

The thing with Devon was you wanted to talk to him, but at the same time, you didn’t want to. It wasn’t Devon anymore, really, but a hard-voiced stranger, who rang and said hard things, hurtful things. Jackie talking, through Devon’s mouth. She was sending Devon letters. Felix learned this from Lloyd (Devon had not said; Felix had not asked). Their mother had a strange power over people — Felix did not discount witchcraft. (Jackie claimed a Ghanaian grandmother. These things were not unknown there.) She surely had a power over Felix, once upon a time. A power over the girls. But she was a person with whom there would always be a “last straw.” Devon would have to learn this, as Felix and the girls had all learned it. The end for Felix was clearly marked. On that occasion it was eight years since her last “visit.” The girls refused to see her. Always sentimental, Felix took her in, cautiously, promising nothing. For moral support, he asked his brother to come round. Devon began the evening at the other end of the room, standing against the wall, glaring. He ended the night cozy on the sofa, accepting Jackie’s sloppy kisses all over his face. Felix softened, too. He brought down the white rum from a high shelf. Foolish. Tia called it early, as did Ruby. Lloyd. Everybody called it. Jackie’s sister, Karen, said, “Listen to me: put her out your door and change the locks.” But at the time it had seemed that Devon’s acquiescence allowed — necessitated — Felix’s. He had suffered so much more than Felix over the years, yet held no grudge.

She turned up in high summer. Many days spent smoking weed together on Hampstead Heath, laughing madly, rolling about in the grass like young lovers. Jackie, Devon, Felix. At nights they sat up drinking. “I can’t believe how yellow this boy is! Look at them curls!” Emerging from the kitchen with a pack of biscuits, she told poor Devon quite casually that his father had died, some years ago — drowned. To Felix, it sounded like a tall tale. He kept quiet. In the end they were half-brothers: it wasn’t his business. He had his own father, his own troubles. In the early hours she stood in the middle of the floor, as if on stage, and spoke of how lonely and miserable she’d been in England, as a young woman. This Felix had never heard; he found he wanted to hear it, although he knew perfectly well she could have exchanged this life story for any other narrative and he would have accepted it just as readily. He wanted to love her. He tried to imagine life in notorious Garvey House, being “spat at by NF kids in the grocers.” She talked out her various conspiracy theories. These Felix did not interrupt. He wanted to be happy. There was one about the towers. There was one about the moon landings. The Virgin Mary was black. The planet was getting colder. 2012 would be the end of everything. She seemed to have spent the past few years in Internet cafes around the country, gathering this information. Devon followed her willingly on every point. Felix, more skeptical, let it wash over him, without comment. She had her hair tied in two thick plaits like a Red Indian, a thin gold band tied across her forehead. And lo, there would come a perfect future world with no money and no shops, just storehouses in the middle of town, with everything you needed in them and no locks on the doors. People living all together with no religion. Her eyes, he knew, had the taint of madness.

The next day she was gone, with Felix’s cashpoint card, his watch, all his chains. Two months later Devon walked into Khandi’s Gem Express and Jewelry on the high road, with a kid from South Kilburn, Curtis Ainger, and a gun. Smile, you’re on CCTV. Nineteen when he went in. Twenty-three this summer.

• • •

“Sorry, could you ask your friend to move his feet?”

Felix took out his earbuds. A white woman, hugely pregnant and sweating, stood over him.

“I’d like to sit down?” she said.

Felix looked at his motionless “friend” opposite, and thought it best to speak to the other one. He leaned forward. This guy had his head against the glass, oblivious and half hidden by his hood, nodding to his music. Felix touched him lightly on the knee.

“Oi, bruv — I think the lady wants to sit down.”

The guy removed one can of his bulky earphones.

“What?”

“I think the lady wants to sit down.”

The pregnant woman smiled tightly. It was a hot day to be in that state. Looking at her made the sweat break out across Felix’s nose.

“Yeah? Why you asking me though? Why you touching me?”

“What?”

“Why you asking me. Why don’t she ask me?”

“Your man’s got his feet on her seat, blud.”

“But is it your business, though? Why you tryna make it your business? Who you callin’ blud? I ain’t your blud.”

“I didn’t say it was my—”

“Is it your business, though? You got a seat — you fucking get up.” Felix tried to defend himself; the kid waved a hand in his face. “Shut up — fool.”

The other guy opened one eye and laughed quietly. Felix stood up.

“Take mine — I’m getting off.”

“Thank you.” Felix saw how badly she was shaking, and that her eyes were watery. He angled himself out of her way, and felt the moist skin of her arms against his own. She sat down. She looked directly at the two men. Her voice was wobbly: “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” she said.

They were pulling into Kilburn Station. The carriage was silent. No one looked — or they looked so quickly their glances were undetectable. Felix felt a great wave of approval, smothering and unwanted, directed toward him, and just as surely, contempt and disgust enveloping the two men and separating them, from Felix, from the rest of the carriage, from humanity. They seemed to feel it: abruptly they both stood and hustled toward the door, where Felix already stood waiting. He could hear the inevitable thrum of cusses, directed at him. The doors blessedly opened; Felix found himself shoulder-charged; he stumbled onto the platform like a clown. Laughter, close, then vanishing. He looked up to see the soles of their trainers as they took the stairs two at a time, jumped the barrier and disappeared.

• • •

Trees shaggy overhead. Hedges wild over fences. Every crack in the pavement, every tree root. The way the sun hits the top deck of the 98. The walls have grown taller outside the Jewish school, and outside the Muslim one. The Kilburn Tavern has been repainted, shiny black with gold lettering. If he hurries he may even get home before her. Lie down in that clean room, that good place. Pull her into his body. Start all over again, fresh.

Outside the Tavern, Felix spotted Hifan and Kelly eating a tray of chips at a picnic table, both of them from his year at school — he bald, she still looking fine. To get a laugh Felix high-fived Hifan, kissed Kelly on her cheek, stole a chip, and walked on, like it was all one movement, a form of dance. “What you so happy about?” Kelly called after him, and Felix shouted, “Love, shorty, L.O.V.E. LOVE!” without turning round, and did his pimp-roll walk, and enjoyed the laughter as he disappeared smoothly round the corner. Nobody to see him collide with the gray bins out the back. He steadied himself with a hand to the Tavern’s back door: fancy colored glass now and a new brass doorknob. Wood floors where carpets used to be, real food instead of crisps and scratchings. About six quid for a glass of wine! Jackie wouldn’t recognize it. Maybe by now she’d be one of those exiles on the steps of the betting shop, clutching a can of Special Brew, driven from the pubs by the refits. Maybe she was never that bad. It was impossible to know, with Lloyd, how much was true, how much pure venom. Felix glanced through the window to the interior: no more velvety corner booth. Where he had sat with his sisters, six little feet not even touching the ground, earnestly listening to Jackie give her leaving speech. Some new man she’d met who made her feel free. Lived in Southampton, some white guy. At seven you don’t know. He didn’t know that freedom was something you could feel. He thought it was something you simply were. He didn’t know where Southampton was. He loved his own father and did not want to go and live with a strange white man. Only when the conversation was almost over did it occur to Felix that she wasn’t asking him to come to Southampton. Two years later, she turned up in London with a light brown baby boy. Left Devon with Lloyd and went — wherever. Wherever she went.

• • •

On Albert Road Felix fell in step behind a tall girl in tight red jeans and black spaghetti-strapped vest. She had broad shoulders and a square trunk. She had more muscles than Felix, and as she walked her muscles moved together, fluid and complicated: the way the arms attached to the back and to the backside and to the hips. Not like Grace at all, who was shorter and curvier and softer. This woman could pick Felix up and run with him all the way home, put him down on his doorstep like a baby. She wore a lot of cheap silver rings, green round their bands, and running down one forearm a tattoo of a flower with a long, winding stem. Her heels were dry and cracked. The label on her top was showing. Should he tuck it in? A trickle of sweat ran from her ear, along her neck and down her back, straight down that muscled division — strongly defined — between her left side and her right. Her phone rang. She answered it and called somebody “Baby.” She turned right. Another life. Felix felt someone push two fingers hard into his back.

“Money. Phone. Now.”

They were either side of him. Hoods up but perfectly visible. Same two from the train. Not much taller than he was. Not much wider, either. It had just turned six o’clock.

“NOW.”

He felt himself being jostled, manhandled. He looked up at their faces. The talkative one, the one doing all the cussing, was truly a kid; the other, the silent one, was closer to Felix’s own age, and too old for such foolishness. He had ashy hands, like Felix’s own, and the same dull sheen to his face. Along his cheek a scar ran. He was local somehow, familiar. Felix tried turning away but they swung him back round. He swore at them at length, creatively, and looked to his right: four houses down the tall girl put a key to a lock and went inside.

“Listen, I ain’t giving you nothing. Nothing!”

He found himself on the pavement. As he got back up on his knees he heard one of them say, “Big man on the train. Ain’t the big man now.” And instead of fear, a feeling of pity came over him; he remembered when being the big man was all that mattered. He reached into his pockets. They could have his phone. They could have the lone twenty in his pocket if it came to that. He’d been mugged many times and knew the drill. When he was younger they might have wounded his ego; now the old fury and humiliation were gone — they could have it all. Everything he cared about was elsewhere. He tried to laugh at them as he handed over his meager valuables: “Should have caught me two hours ago, blud. Two hours ago I was loaded.” The kid gave him a dead-eyed look, face set in a violent pout. It was a necessary mask, without which he could not do what he was doing. “And the stones,” said the kid. Felix touched his ears. Treasured zirconias, a present from Grace.

“You’re dreamin’,” he said.

He turned once more toward the street. A breeze passed over the three of them, filling their hoods and sending a cloud of sycamore leaves spinning to the pavement. A firm punch came to his side. Punch? The pain sliced to the left, deep and down. Warm liquid reversed up his throat. Over his lips. Yet it couldn’t be oblivion as long as he could name it, and with this in mind he said aloud what had been done to him, what was being done to him, he tried to say it, he said nothing. Grace! Down Willesden Lane a bus came rumbling; at the same moment in which Felix glimpsed the handle and the blade he saw the 98 reopen its doors to accept the last soul in sight — a young girl in a yellow summer dress. She ran with her ticket held high above her head like the proof of something, got there just in time, cried out “Thank you!” and let the doors fold neatly behind her.